The United States emerged from the Second World War as the acknowledged leader of the western world. Almost immediately, however, an arms race with the communist bloc led by the Soviet Union, led to the threat of nuclear war. The mood of anxiety and paranoia was fueled by hearings in the House Un-American Activities led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, which posed the question “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the communist party?” Theatre and film artists were primary targets and those who refused to answer were blacklisted. Meanwhile, young men returning from the War had trouble finding jobs, divorce rates in America escalated, and the family unit, considered the center of the American dream, began to fall apart.
In the early 1960s an “Iron Curtain” descended between capitalist
and communist areas of Europe, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to
the brink of nuclear holocaust, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and
the United States went to war in Vietnam. This conflict escalated enormously
and by the late 1960s tens of thousands of American soldiers had been killed.
Racial tensions heightened, and in spite of historic Civil Rights legislation,
the murder of Martin Luther King in 1968 caused an explosion of rage to erupt
in inner cities. The same year saw the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the
collapse of peace talks in Paris between the U.S. and violent protest at the
Democratic Convention in Chicago. At this time the war in particular and a
conservative, unfeeling “Establishment” in general as met with rebellion in
America as well as throughout Europe.
After the defeat of American forces in Vietnam in the early 1970s
President Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate Scandal, the U.S.
economy went from boom to bust, and later in the decade problems in the Middle
East escalated mightily when a conservative religious regime took over in Iran.
The 1980s brought with it a new conservatism, illustrated by the presidency of
Ronald Reagan. Ironically, as the cold war ended, new and more difficult
problems cropped up in the Baltic States, where charges of “ethnic cleansing”
echoed the extermination of Jews in World War II. At the same time a radically
conservative Muslim government took over Afghanistan.
As the new millennium began, on September 11 2001 the entire world
was shaken by terror, in the form of two passenger jets smashing into the World
Trade Center in New York City. In the
fallout from this terrorist act, the American president declared war on Iraq,
which ousted its corrupt leader, Saddam Hussein, but which strengthened an
insurgency that has only increased division in an already divided world. As
this is being written late in 2013 tensions throughout the Middle East have
escalated, thanks in part to U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, the “Arab spring”
which looked promising but which has created unrest in Egypt and elsewhere,
continued problems in Iraq and a dreadful civil war in Syria, and despite the
assassination of its leader an ongoing threat from Al Quaeda and other
organizations including the Taliban. And there’s much more along these lines in
foreign affairs, as well as a stalemate at home in the U.S. Congress that has
brought the U.S. into what seems like a permanent state of gridlock.
Theatre in the United States since WWII has attempted to reflect
the new uncertainties. Major plays questioned American politics, economics and
personal life. Technically, realism, the theatrical style that had been set in
the era
between the Wars, continued, though usually somewhat modified.
Stage settings suggested place rather than
detailing it, in a sort of
“theatricalized realism,” practiced in all the vital elements of
theatre.
The director remained (and remains) at the center of the
theatrical event. Elia Kazan (1909-2003), a former member of the
Group Theatre, emerged in the late 1940s and early 1950s as the most important
theatre director in America. Kazan directed many successful plays,
including the first productions of two of the most important postwar plays, Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire. Kazan’s
favorite designer, Jo Mielziner
(1901-1976), used elements of the new stagecraft in a unique blend of symbolism
and realism in his designs for those plays and others.
Other directors worked in a style similar to Kazan’s. One of the most important after the War was
Harold Clurman, Kazan’s old mentor in the Group Theatre, who had directed Kazan
in several of that theatre’s productions.
One director,
however, adopted a more European avant-garde approach than
most Americans shortly after the war. Alan
Schneider (1917-1984) championed the Theatre of the Absurd in the United
States, introducing this country to the works of Samuel Beckett. He directed one of Edward Albee’s first
absurdist one-act plays, The American
Dream, in 1961, which led to a longstanding partnership between director
and playwright, the highlight being Schneider’s production of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in
1963. Schneider was one of the most
important directors at early regional theatre Arena Stage in Washington, DC,
and he also directed early plays by Harold Pinter.
The acting style looked back to the Stanislavsky system, as
modified by the Group Theatre. Group alums actor/ teacher Robert Lewis,
producer Cheryl Crawford, and Kazan himself,
founded the Actors Studio in 1947, which was created to allow actors to develop
their own “method” from inner psychological “truth.” The Group had been a
contentious place at times, and the Actors Studio was not free of
contention. Lewis left after a year, and Lee Strasberg took over as
master teacher of actors. Strasberg focused on sense memory and the
actor’s psyche in his training of many of the great actors of the day, including
Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Marilyn Monroe.
New playwrights were at work as well, and two of them moved close
to Eugene O’Neill in importance. O’Neill himself, though he died in 1953,
continued as a strong
presence. Iceman
Cometh was first produced in 1956, Long
Day’s Journey into Night in 1957. Of the new writers, Tennessee Williams offered a sort of
poetic realism in his plays. Highly symbolic, many of Williams’ works
contrasted the spiritual and the material (Moon Lake Casino vs the Rubicon
Business Academy). Generally the illusionistic world of a spiritual type
collapses before the harsh realities of a character with material traits. We
certainly see this in Glass Menagerie,
Streetcar, and Summer and Smoke;
and to a lesser extent in Cat on a Hot
Tin Roof and Night of the Iguana.
Arthur Miller offered a brand
of social realism based on Ibsen. In Death
of a Salesman and All My Sons,
the search
for material success obscures the more important values of love,
doing the morally right thing, and living up to ones own responsibility.
In The Crucible and A View from the Bridge, Miller examines
moral responsibility; and in some of his later works, like Incident at Vichy and After
the Fall he hits on this theme in perhaps too didactic a manner. In
2004 Miller’s final play, written at age 88, received a production in Chicago.
Both Williams and Miller suffered the harsh judgment of American theatre critics. After a string of successes from each writer, they began to experiment, and their experimental works were clobbered regularly by the press, so much so that Miller premiered most of his later work in England and Europe. Both writers are produced regularly on European Stages.
William Inge wrote in a sort
of mixture of Williams and Miller, but maintained a unique voice in his plays,
which included Picnic and Bus Stop. While still often
performed, these plays are limited in range and depth, compared to those of
Williams and Miller.
Edward Albee (1928- ) began by experimenting in the absurdist
vein with plays such as The Zoo Story
(1958), which
had its first production not in the United States but in Berlin,
and The American Dream (1960). Albee came of age in 1962 with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in which
the tortured relationship of George and Martha was similar to couples created
by Williams, Pirandello and Strindberg. He followed this with the almost
impenetrable
Tiny Alice (1964) and in
1966 wrote A Delicate Balance,
another difficult but very powerful work that won the Pulitzer Prize. His
later plays grew more and more abstract and began to be attacked rather
viciously by critics, but Albee has enjoyed a renaissance in recent years. In
1994 his Three Tall Women won him
another Pulitzer, and in that same season the Signature Theatre in New York
devoted its entire repertoire to Albee’s works. His Play About the Baby (1998), first produced in England, proved an
off-Broadway success in 2001, and The
Goat, or Who is Sylvia (2002), won the Tony Award for best play.
In the 1960s, the most successful playwright in American theatre
was Neil Simon (1927- ). In that decade Simon
turned out a
string of box office hits, among them Barefoot
in the Park and The Odd Couple.
Later in his career, Simon turned biographical and sentimental in plays such as
Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues,
and Lost in Yonkers. His more
recent plays, which include Laughter on
the 23rd Floor (1993) and London
Suite (1995), have not been as successful, and revivals of his most popular
plays have fallen flat, but Simon has been a major force in popular
mainstream American theatre.
The principal development in commercial theatre from the 1940s to
the 1960s was the growth of the American musical. In fact this period is
sometimes referred to as the “Golden
Age” of the musical. Oklahoma! (1943), the first work by the
new team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar
Hammerstein, inaugurated the Golden Age. In addition to telling a
relatively serious story through dialogue and songs, as Showboat had done in the 1920s, Oklahoma!
also used dance to forward the action, in the form of a dream ballet. Thus all
the major components of the musical, dialogue, song and dance, were engaged to
forward the plot. Rodgers and Hammerstein followed this, their first
collaboration, with a string of major hits written in a similar fashion; Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949) The King
and I (1951).
The Rodgers & Hammerstein model is often referred to as a “book” musical. Among the many
successful composers in this form are Alan Lerner and Fritz Loewe, with Brigadoon
(1947), My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot
(1960); Frank Loesser with Guys and Dolls
(1950), Most Happy Fella (1956) and How to Succeed in Business without Really
Trying, which won the Pulitzer in 1962.
Leonard Bernstein created On the
Town, about three sailors on leave in Manhattan, in 1944, wrote a musical
based on Voltaire’s Candide in 1956,
but his greatest triumph was a modernized Romeo
and Juliet – West Side Story in
1957. Other successful musicals included
Jule Styne’s Funny Girl, Jerry Bock’s
Fiddler on the Roof, and Jerry
Herman’s Hello Dolly, all in 1964.
In the mid-1960s major shifts occurred in the musical, most
obviously in its score, which began to be feature rock ‘n’ roll music and
amplified guitars. The great early
example is Hair
(1967), by Galt
McDermott, Gerome Ragni and James Rado.
A more significant change occurred in plots of musicals. The warm,
sentimental plots of Golden Age musicals were modified. Instead of a love triangle,
entire groups in America began to be examined, often in a disturbingly
realistic manner. Hair initiated this new kind of musical, which has become known as
the “concept”
musical, by looking at
a group of hippies, the love generation. The greatest composer working in the
new style was Stephen Sondheim
(1930- ), whose Company in 1970
dissected yuppie couples typical of that era.
While Sondheim engaged in other kinds of writing for the theatre, as in A Little Night Music and Sweeney Todd, he also continued
writing
concept musicals, the best of which include Into
the Woods and Assassins. This
form is widely varied. Pieces as
disparate as A Chorus Line (1975) by
Michael Bennett (1943-1987) and Cats
by Andrew Lloyd Weber are both concept musicals. In Sondheim’s case
especially, the concepts can be difficult to deal with. He explores new musical
forms and dares to experiment. His musicals are brilliant, but do not
always make money. This has created a dilemma for commercial theatre.
Musicals after the 1960s frequently took on a darker tone,
reflecting the times. The finest practitioners of this style were John Kander (1927- ) and Fred Ebb (1932-2004), whose greatest
works were Cabaret (1966), which
examined the rise of Nazism via cabaret performance, and Chicago (1975) which was a darkly comic take on Roxie Hart and
other women who murdered their husbands or lovers.
The musical is America’s gift to the world of theatre, right? But
then the British invaded! They
launched a successful
assault led by Andrew Lloyd Webber (1948- ), whose string of major successes included Jesus Christ Superstar in 1970, followed
by Evita (1976), Cats (1982), and Phantom of
the Opera (1986). Other British hit musicals such as Les Miserables and Miss Saigon were produced by Cameron MacIntosh. Recently these
spectacular shows featuring mighty machines and crafty contraptions seem less
able to make the ocean crossing.
And now for something completely different: Let's head OFF Broadway in the next lecture!
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| Despite Dr Jack's deploring it...still it ran...and now it's closed. |
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