What we Shoulda Did...or, a glimpse at Recent U.S. Theatre History

Some Recent U.S. Theatre History

I have always thought that theatre history (according to Dr Jack, which is what students got – like it or not – for 20-plus years) should be a three-semester course, one to approximately 1600, another to 1900, a third the twentieth (and now a bit of the twenty-first) century. But alas, the department gave me only two semesters in which to teach many students the entire gamut. This means we left out large chunks of world theatre, and some important and very recent events in U.S, theatre. This small and incomplete addendum attempts to address the latter, which I spoke about in a more comprehensive manner in another course I taught, Contemporary Developments in Theatre.

A lifetime ago - or more!

One day a long long time ago, when I still used to look under the hood of my car, I opened it one day at a gas station because steam was coming out. I almost immediately took a cloth and opened the radiator, from which a huge hot waterspout gushed. I jumped back, very lucky not to have got scalded or worse. Then an old guy who had been watching all of this sauntered over very slowly and said to me, “What you shoulda did...” Thanks a lot!

Here’s some of what we “shoulda did,” in recent U.S. Theatre history, but never got to:

An Increasingly Diverse Theatrical Culture

In the 1960s, with the introduction of important Civil Rights legislation, several groups that had struggled to maintain 

themselves in the world of theatre began to come into their own. The beginnings of African American theatre had been marred by caricatures of Blacks in minstrel shows, but it grew gradually into a theatre performed by, for, and about Blacks.  In the 1940s the American Negro Theatre lasted for ten years, and in the 1950s a few African American writers rose to some prominence. It was not until 1959, however, when Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) wrote the Tony Award-winning A Raisin in the Sun, that Black theatre had its first truly major success. 

African American Theatre in the 1960s and 70s

After Hansberry’s play an black theatre almost literally exploded onto the scene.  In the 1960s, it was frequently angry theatre, best 

personified in the work of writer Leroi Jones, later Amiri Baraka (1934-  ) whose 1964 play Dutchman featured a violent confrontation on a subway train between a black man and a white woman, and whose later play Slave Ship (1969) inventively presented the brutal treatment of blacks by their white overlords on a voyage from Africa to America.  In addition to his writing, Baraka opened the Harlem’s Black Arts 

Theatre/School in 1964, which was responsible for training many black theatre artists.  Ed Bullins (1935-  ) wrote several plays focused on black pride, winning an Obie Award and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for The Taking of Miss Janie (1975).  He served as playwright-in-residence at the New Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, one of several African American theatres to spring up in the 1960s. The longest-lived of these was the Negro Ensemble Company, founded in 1967 by Robert Hooks and Douglas Turner Ward.  The group was able to maintain itself well into the 1990s, winning a Tony Award for Joseph Walker’s The River Niger in 1973 and the Pulitzer Prize for Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play in 1981.

Alice Childress (1920-1994) wrote several plays, including Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White, which was produced by Joe Papp at the Public Theatre, and Wine in the 

Wilderness (1969), about an underestimated but powerful young black woman.  More recently Ntozake Shange (1948-  ) wrote a series of poems, for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf (1975), which she performed at bars in New York’s Lower East Side, and called it a “choreopoem,” a very apt term for it. This unique piece of work was produced at the New Lafayette Theatre, then at the Public, after which it transferred to the Booth Theatre for a Broadway run. 

Shange’s successful choreopoem was unusual.  Most black theatre, on the other hand, never moved beyond small performing spaces.  

The greatest exception to this rule was the work of August Wilson (1945-2005), whose plays received critical praise as well as commercial success. Wilson’s usual director was Lloyd Richards (1923-2006), who had directed A Raisin in the Sun and who went on to head the prestigious Yale School of Drama.  Wilson’s plays were work-shopped, frequently at the Eugene O’Neill Center in 

Connecticut, then produced regionally, often at Yale Rep, and most made their way to lengthy runs on Broadway.  Wilson received two Pulitzer Prizes, for Fences (1985) and for The Piano Lesson (1988), but several of his other plays are equally as fine.  He completed a ten-play series that depicts a slice of African American life (frequently located in the Hill district of Pittsburgh PA, where Wilson grew up) for each decade of the twentieth century. 

Recent African American Playwrights

Other vitally important African American theatre practitioners include George C. Wolfe (1954-  ), who wrote plays and musicals. 

He then began to direct, most prestigiously Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, after which he ran the Public Theatre for ten years.  Anna Deavere Smith (1950-  ) examined violent racial confrontations by interviewing a cross-section of those involved, then performing all of the roles in tour-de-force one woman shows, such as Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992.  More 

recently, writers Kia Corthron, Lynn Nottage (Ruined) and Susan Lori Parks have been frequently produced, in fact Parks won the Pulitzer in 2002 for Topdog/Underdog. The same year, Dael Orlandersmith’s Yellowman was nominated for the same prize. A play on the difficult subject of “internal” racism, Yellowman tells the story of a relationship between a light-skinned black male and a darker-skinned black female, unfolded in monologues by the two actors.

Hispanic American Theatre

Hispanic American theatre also grew beginning in the 1960s, though it has had less sustained success than African American theatre.  The title “Hispanic American” is not satisfactory, as there is a world of difference between, for example, the Chicano experience and the Cuban American experience, but within this 

widely diverse culture several writers, directors and theatre groups have flourished, if not usually in mainstream commercial theatre venues.  Luis Valdez (1940-  ) founded El Teatro Campesino in Southern California, to bring theatre to the migrant workers struggling in the fields.  His most important play, Zoot Suit (1976), was a powerful piece written in a style reminiscent of the Federal Theatre Project’s living 

newspapers, which depicted the trial of several young Chicanos after race riots in Los Angeles during World War II.  The company has recently reorganized, but is still very much alive, and every year at Christmas they present a medieval-style cycle play, La Pastorella, at an old mission.  Across the country, several Hispanic American troupes perform in New York, including Repertorio Español,  INTAR and the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre. At the Nuyorican Poets’ Café in the 

Lower East Side plays as well as poetry readings have been presented, perhaps most famously Miguel Pinero’s Short Eyes, a bleak prison drama.  Important women in the movement include Maria Irene Fornes (1930-  ), who has written Mud (1983) and the Conduct of Life, and Milcha Sanchez Scott, whose play Roosters (1987) imagines Chicano men as roosters in a cock fight.  Jose Rivera and Eduardo Machado have been produced in regional theatres and in Off-Broadway venues. More recently, Stephen Adley Guirgis writes darkly comic plays such as Jesus Hopped the A-Train and Our Lady of 121^st Street for the LAByrinth Theatre Company in Manhattan. An impressive moment for Hispanic American theatre came when Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, with a complex plot about workers at cigar factories and a tangled love affair between one of them and a “reader” at such a factory, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.

Asian American Theatre

Asian American theatre began to proliferate in the mid-1960s and has been produced frequently on both coasts.  The East-West Players was the first major company to form, in Los Angeles in 

1965. It featured plays by Philip Kan Gotanda and Frank Chin among many others, about the Asian American experience. In 1977 New York’s Pan Asian Repertory Theatre opened to celebrate the talents of Asian American artists. Run by actor/dancer Tisa Chang, some of its most interesting work crosses cultures, and includes intercultural presentations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shogun Macbeth.  While several Asian American writers have been regularly produced, none has achieved the stature of David Henry Hwang (1957-  ).  He has written many plays before and 

since, but his reputation rests on his Tony and Pulitzer Prize-winning play M. Butterfly (1988), which inverts the stereotype of the strong western male dominating a weak Asian woman. This highly theatrical piece is based on the true story of a French diplomat in China who fell in love with a male portrayer of females in a Beijing Opera troupe.  In 2002 Hwang substantially re-wrote the libretto of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Flower Drum Song, which was produced on Broadway.  Since 1972, performance artist Ping Chong (1946- ) has combined visual arts, video and dance into award-winning productions that explore theatre on national and intercultural levels at New York City venues such as La Mama, The Joyce Theatre and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, as well as embarking on frequent international tours.\

Native American Theatre

Native American culture was rich in ritualistic dance dramas, such as the Plains Sun Dances and the Iroquois False Face Dramas, since long before Europeans settled the Americas. In mainstream 

Native American Theatre Ensemble in a performance
of Foghorn in Berlin, 1973)

theatre in the United States, however, they were portrayed as cultural stereotypes, ranging from the “noble savage” to the “no-good lyin’ Injun.” In the early 1970s, however, writer Hanay Geiogamah (1945-  ) formed the Native American Theatre Ensemble, and one of the first feminist theatres in America, Spiderwoman, was founded in 1975 by three American Indian sisters. In spite of these efforts, few Native American plays have been featured in commercial or major non-profit theatre venues in the United States. 

Gay and Lesbian Theatre

Gay and lesbian theatre has increased rapidly, with lesbian troupes springing up in Minneapolis, Atlanta and Pittsburgh throughout the 1970s. Much of the energy in this direction was focused in New 

York’s Greenwich Village, at the WOW Café, where Peggy Shaw, Lois Weaver and Deborah Margolins founded Split Britches, a feminist and lesbian troupe, in 1981 as an offshoot of the Spiderwoman Theatre.  They produced political comedies such as Little Women (1988) and Belle Reprieve (1991), their satire on Streetcar Named Desire, using Brechtian methods to confront and critique the heterosexual mainstream.  Gay theatre “came out” in 1968, when Mart Crowley's The Boys in the 

Band was produced on Broadway.  The play was somewhat stereotypical, but placed a group of gay characters at center stage in commercial theatre.  After that, other plays, usually beginning off Broadway, began to take the stage, notably Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy (1983).  Martin Sherman’s Bent  (1978) told the story of gays in Nazi concentration camps, and the Tony Award-winning musical La Cage Aux Folles in 1983 depicted two flamboyantly gay men playing straight for the sake of an impending marriage. The AIDS 

epidemic prompted angry plays about society’s failure to act, beginning in 1985 when Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William Hoffman’s As Is were produced. Charles Ludlam (1943-

1987) excelled at female impersonation in his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, where he usually played the heroines, such as Camille, in 1973, and The Mystery of Irma Vep in 1984.  While these pieces were hilarious romps, they moved beyond mere camp into a unique theatrical experience that has been much examined and praised since Ludlam’s premature death from AIDS.

Terrence McNally and Tony Kushner

While some gay writers focus solely on gay issues, playwrights such as Terrence McNally (1939-  ) and Tony Kushner (1956-  ) 

Terrence McNally

deal with other themes as well in their work. Terrence McNally’s 
The Ritz (1975) and Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994) are plays about the gay experience, but McNally is also quite comfortable writing about heterosexual relationships in both caustic and touching ways, for example in Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991) which examines two married couples, and in Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune (1982), about a lonely middle-aged man and woman trying to create a relationship.  McNally’s Master Class (1995) reveals his love for and knowledge of opera, as he imagines 

the great opera diva Maria Callas revealing much about her own life while teaching three different students how to sing. In the early 1990s Tony Kusher wrote a towering two-play series called Angels in America (1991-1993) that brilliantly mixed issues of AIDS, repression, politics and religion in a tour-de-force “fantasia” on American values. In Homebody/Kabul he attempts to come to terms with western ways of thinking and militant Islam in Afghanistan, and Kushner’s musical Caroline or Change, for which he wrote the words and Jeanine Tesori the music in 2004, deals with race issues and coming of age. In it a young teenage Jewish boy living in the deep South attempts to befriend the African American maid, Caroline, which leads to disturbing results.

Other Important Recent Playwrights

      

While it would be difficult to argue that writing for the stage in the United States has been as incisive and theatrically excellent as recent British playwriting, a number of fine American writers have 

emerged since the 70s. Sam Shepard (1943-  ) started in the Off-Off Broadway movement with surreal and absurdist one-acts written in a language structured like a jazz or rock and roll instrumental solo. He began to make major contributions in the late 1970s with The Curse of the Starving Class (1977) and Buried Child (1978), both of which depicted completely dysfunctional 

families symbolizing an American dream turned nightmare.  The plays were critically acclaimed, Curse of the Starving Class winning an Obie and Buried Child winning the Pulitzer Prize. Shepard continued his study of the exploded American family in plays such as True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983), portraying a half brother and sister as passionate lovers. More recently he has written fewer plays, concentrating instead on acting in film, but the war in Iraq prompted him to write a savage farce, God of Hell, in 2004, in which a terrifying official invades an American home in the name of security.

David Mamet (1947-  ) has also investigated the decline of American society in his plays, but from a slightly different 

perspective than Shepard’s. Mamet is interested in the world of corrupt business transactions, enacted by incompetent small-time thieves, as in American Buffalo (1975, Obie Award), or by fraudulent real estate salesmen vying for the best contacts in Glengarry Glen Ross (1983, Pulitzer Prize), or by Hollywood executives hustling scripts in Speed-the-Plow (1988). In Oleanna (1992) he dissected the politically correct world on college campuses in his depiction of a female student who claims sexual harassment against a professor. Mamet has continued to write plays, but is equally comfortable in film, as both writer and director, and his recent writing for the stage has not been seen the critical successes of his work in the 1980s.

Paula Vogel (1951-  ) is among the finest female playwrights in America. She began her career with an Obie-winning play, Baltimore Waltz in 1982, about a sister whose brother is dying of 

Paula Vogel

AIDS. Her finest play to date is How I Learned to Drive (1997). This highly sensitive treatment of a teenaged girl’s coming of age and her uncle’s unnatural attraction to her won Vogel the Pulitzer Prize. In 2004-2005 New York’s Signature Theatre, which devotes an entire season to the work of one American playwright, chose Vogel as its focus. Other notable women writers include Marsha Norman, Beth Henley and Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006).

Mary Louise Parker and David Morse in How I Learned to Drive

Postmodern Performance in America

Richard Schechner (1934-  ) founded The Performance Group in 1967 at a decidedly non-traditional space on Wooster Street in the Soho area of New York City called the Performing Garage.  Schechner and his company created what he called 

The Performance Group in Commune

“environmental” theatre, engaging in activities comparable to those of the Living Theatre and the Open Theatre, and based largely on Jerzy Grotowski’s experiments.  One of their most famous performances was Dionysus in 69, a company-created piece based very loosely on Euripides’ The Bacchae, which was concerned more with recreating a bacchanal of communal and religious ecstasy than with faithfully enacting the ancient Greek tragedy.  The action unfolded not on a stage, but in an environment where actors and audience moved among each other and interacted in song, dance and chants.   The Performance Group continued these experiments into the mid-1970s, frequently using well-known texts by Sam Shepard, Jean Genet, and Bertolt Brecht for environmental staging and interactive performance.

The Wooster Group

      

In 1975 a unit of the Performance Group was created under the leadership of Elizabeth LeCompte (1944-  ) and with the help of 

others including Spalding Gray, which gradually superseded the old company, and in 1980 was re-named The Wooster Group.   Like its predecessor, The Wooster Group makes use of traditional texts, but in often radical “deconstructions,” drastically altering plot, character and theme to its own artistic, political and cultural ends.  Thornton Wilder’s Our Town was thus deconstructed into a work called Routes 1 & 9 (1981) that examined what was lacking in Wilder’s vision of a “typical” American town, such as racial 

minorities.  Arthur Miller would not allow his play The Crucible to be used by the Group’s L.S.D. (1983).  Brace Up! is an outrageous re-thinking of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and To You, the Birdie (2002) sends up Racine’s famous seventeenth century tragedy Phédre.  The Wooster Group does not work environmentally, but faces its audience and features multi-media, particularly video, in its unique performances.  The group’s finest performer is the versatile Kate Valk, and it has attracted other fine actors including Willem Dafoe and Frances McDormand. It is one of the most lauded avant-garde troupes in the United States, in 1991 receiving an Obie for sustained excellence, and touring nationally and internationally.

Richard Foreman

Another artist devoted to reshaping the theatre to his own vision is Richard Foreman (1937-  ) a director/designer/playwright who 

founded the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre in 1968, where he presents his own avant-garde works.  Like many other postmodern theatre artists, Foreman is less interested in telling a story with beginning, middle and end than in setting up images in a space and discovering different ways of looking at them.  He frequently uses untrained actors as he uses other props or set pieces, and in plays such as Total Recall (1970) he can be seen in his productions running the show like a puppet master, stopping 

and starting the action as he chooses.  He produces theatre pieces such as Rhoda in Potatoland and Now that Communism is Dead my Life Feels Empty, expressing his unique vision once a year at his base, St. Mark’s Church in Greenwich Village. In 2005 he produced The Gods are Pounding my Head (Lumberjack Messiahs), which he announced as his last work for the stage. As of 2007 he was still producing plays, but they now feature a good bit of video as well. One of his most recent works, Wake Up Mr Sleepy: Your Unconscious Mind is Dead, includes two very large screens on which a good bit of the action is displayed. Foreman has also often been invited to direct internationally, and has done so with plays by Georg Buchner, Vaclav Havel, Bertolt Brecht and others. 

Mabou Mines

Mabou Mines, a collaborative experimental theatre company, was founded in 1970. Its original members were Lee Breuer (1937-  ), JoAnne Akalaitis (1937-  ), Ruth Maleczech (1939-2013), and David Warrilow (1934-  ).  As a group they feature multi-media and 

frequently work with painters and sculptors as well as important composers such as Philip Glass to create a form that reaches beyond theatre to span the performing and visual arts.  Breuer’s 1970 production The Red Horse Animation set the style for much American avant-garde theatre, featuring a disjointed story line, relying heavily on visual imagery.  In form it is as much a poem as a play.  The piece premiered at the Guggenheim Museum, and featured Akalaitis, Malaczech and Warrilow.  Company members have often created works independent of Mabou Mines. Breuer for example conceived, adapted and directed The Gospel at Colonus in 1983, for the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, setting the ancient tale in an African American gospel church. In 1984 Akalaitis directed a controversial Endgame at the 

American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge Massachusetts. She has championed the work of Franz Xaver Kroetz, giving the United States the first taste of that German writer’s play Through the Leaves.  Akalaitis took over artistic direction from Joseph Papp at the Public Theatre in 1991 but proved too controversial in her productions and was replaced.  Maleczech played title role in one of Mabou Mines’ best-known productions, a gender-reversed King Lear set in Georgia in the 1950s, directed by Breuer in 1990.  The company has received praise for its distinctive productions of Beckett, and Warrilow (who passed in 1995) was a Beckett specialist. In 1979 he performed Monologue, a play Beckett wrote specifically for him.

In 1986 Mabou Mines received an Obie for sustained achievement.  Breuer mounted a stunning version of the Peter Pan story, Peter and Wendy, in 1997.  This piece features one actress who narrates and speaks the roles, while a wide variety of puppets enact them.  And in 2003 Mabou Mines received Obie awards for Breuer’s darkly comic adaptation of Ibsen’s Doll House, set in a restrictively tiny doll house, the male characters played by dwarfs.

Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson (1941-  ) is perhaps the most important American figure engaged in recent theatrical experimentation. Ironically, he is 

better known and more admired in Europe than in the United States. Since the 1980s nearly all of his work has opened there, though he has been frequently produced at the Alley Theatre in Houston Texas and at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge Massachusetts.  Wilson is less interested in plot than in powerful visual and aural imagery, presented in extended pieces that unfold in carefully choreographed, sometimes extremely slow motion.  He 

has worked frequently on these unique creations with composer Philip Glass, most notably in Einstein on the Beach (1976) and in CIVIL warS (1983-84), a monumental dream-like collage mixing Abraham Lincoln, Prussian Frederick the Great, Italian revolutionary Garibaldi, Hopi Indian rituals and Seneca’s tragedies.  He worked as well with rock legend Lou Reed in The Black Rider (1990), adapted from Weber’s opera Der Freischutz, and Time Rocker (1996), taken from H.G. Welles’ novel The Time Machine.  In addition to his own inventions he has worked frequently with German director/writer Heiner Muller and has also directed opera and plays from the classical and modern repertoire, including The Magic Flute in Paris (1991), and Georg Buchner’s Woyzeck (2000) with composer/performer Tom Waits. 

And as Porky Pig famously stuttered: Th-th-th-th-at's all, folks!