The history of English and American Drama

The timeline
English Drama
Fill the column bellow with the correct  answers. Number 1 has been done for you.
For next period, write at least five authors and their prominent drama including year of
publication (It can be more than one) 

Period of time Main Theme Author Prominent drama

Old Mystery Drama or Unknown The life of Maria Magdalene
English/medieval author
period Morality Plays
Adam and Eve
Religion based
drama
The period 1945– Young Adult; The teddy and ruth's relationship
2000 Homecoming. after moving to london
Coming-of-Age; Harold Pinter
1964
Family Drama
The period 1945– Birling family An Inspector Celebrating Sheila Birling's

2000 An industrial city Calls. engagement to Gerald,

in the north J. B. Priestley Inspector Goole, Eva’s death

Midlands (1945 )

Victorian era Comedy Arms and the Arms and the Man questions
Man. conventional values and uses
George Bernard war and love as his satirical
Shaw. targets.
1894
The period 1945– Realisme Look Back in The life and marital struggles of
2000 an intelligent and educated
Anger

May 8, 1956

John Osborne

(1956)
The period 1945– Drama, Romances The Children’s It is a drama set in an all-girls
2000 Hour. boarding school run by two
Lilian Hellman women, Karen Wright and
Martha Dobie

Source from Wikipedia

American Drama
Fill the column bellow with the correct answers. Number 1 has been done for you.
For next period, write at least five authors and their prominent drama including year of
publication (It can be more than one) 

Period Main Theme Author Prominent drama

of time
The Family Drama, All My Sons  Guilt and Blame.
period Tragedy Arthur Miller  Wealth.
1945–
2000  (1947)  Justice and Judgment.
 Lies and Deceit.
 Morality and Ethics.
 Memory and the Past.
 Family.
 Courage.

The Family Drama, Realism, A Streetcar the experiences of Blanche

period Southern Gothic, Tragedy Named Desire.
1945– Tennessee DuBois, a former Southern
2000 Williams
(1947) belle who, after encountering a

series of personal losses.

The Isolation, loneliness, The Zoo Story The Zoo Story also refers to
period miscommunication as Edward Albee. the play itself, though; it's a
1945– anathematization, social 1958 story about a zoo. Jerry and
2000 disparity and Peter are animals on display
dehumanization in a for your enjoyment
materialistic world.
 The A black family's A Raisin in the Walter and Ruth Younger, 1.
period experiences in south
1945– Chicago Sun Walter and Beneatha
2000
Lorraine
 Hansberry

(1959)
The Daily life, love and Our town The fictional American small
theatre: marriage, death and eternity town of Grover's Corners
1901–45 ThorntonWilder  between 1901 and 1913 

(1938)
Source from wikipedia 
The History of American and English Drama

Drama: The Caboose of Literature

Drama is known as “the caboose of literature” (Robert Sherwood), because, like the caboose
on a train, it lies at the rear of all forms of literature. Drama explores issues and styles only
after they have been introduced by the other arts.

There was great theatrical activity in the US in the 19th century, a time when there were no
movies, TV, or radio. Every town of any size had its theater or “opera house” in which
touring companies of actors performed. However, no significant drama was performed in this
century, with audiences preferring farce, melodrama, and vaudeville to serious efforts. For
the most part, this was “caboose” behavior. The theater tends to dramatize accepted attitudes
and values, only after they have been thoroughly explored by other mediums. Theater is a
social art, one we attend as part of large group, and we seem to respond to something new as
a group more slowly than we do as individuals. When you laugh or cry in a theater, your
response is noticed, especially by those who are not so moved. You are in a sense giving your
approval to those attitudes and values presented in the play.

The Influence of Europe: Psychology and Taboo Subjects

European drama, which was to influence modern American drama profoundly, matured in the
last third of the 19th century with the achievements of three playwrights: Henrik Ibsen,
August Strindberg, and Anton Chekhov. Ibsen, who was profoundly influenced by
psychologists Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung,  tackled subjects such as guilt, sexuality, and
mental illness—subjects that had never before been so realistically and disturbingly portrayed
onstage (like in A Doll’s House and Enemy of the People). Strindberg brought to his
characterizations a unprecedented level of psychological complexity (like in The
Father and The Dance of Death). And Chekhov shifted the subject matter of drama from
wildly theatrical displays of external action and emotions to the concerns of everyday life
(like in The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard). They bequeathed to their literary heirs
plays about life as it is actually lived. They presented characters and situations more or less
realistically, in what has been called the “slice-of-life” dramatic technique.

 
Realism and Eugene O’Neill: Putting American Drama on the Map

Realistic drama is based on the illusion that when we watch a play, we are looking at life
through a “fourth wall” that has been removed so we see watch the action. Soon after the
beginning of the 20th century, realism became the dominant mode of American drama. Very
soon after the little theaters off Broadway succeeded with realistic plays (about 1916),
Broadway adopted it, too.

In 1916 and 1917, two small theater groups in New York (the Provincetown Players and the
Washington Square Players) began to produce new American plays. They provided a
congenial home for new American playwrights like Eugene O’Neill, whose first plays were
produced by the Provincetown Players in MA. These small play groups would produce any
play, in any style, that commercial theater would not touch. These groups were the beginning
of modern American dramatic theater.

Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) is generally considered the first important figure in American

drama. Almost 100 years after the 1920 production of his full-length play, Beyond the
Horizon, he is still regarded as the most important playwright the US has produced. He
introduced into American drama the techniques of realism earlier associated with Ibsen,
Strindberg, and Chekhov. American drama before O’Neill tended to be mild and sentimental,
rarely questioning the life and attitudes it depicted, and almost never challenging the accepted
traditions of the time. It consisted mostly of shows and spectacles staged by special effects
that dazzled audiences. Melodramas and farces were also written for famous actors, much as
TV shows today are written to display the personalities and talents of popular performers.
(A melodrama is a drama such as a play, a film, or a TV program, characterized by
exaggerated emotions, stereotypical characters, and interpersonal conflicts [think the early
silent movies]. A farce is a light dramatic work in which highly improbable plot situations,
exaggerated characters, and often slapstick elements are used for humorous effect [think an
episode of The Three Stooges].) In fact, O’Neill’s father James spent most of his life touring
in a popular melodrama based on The Count of Monte Cristo.

Eugene O’Neill’s intense psychological plays were a radical departure from the romantic (as
in romanticism) convention of theater as entertainment. He was among the first Americans to
include speeches in common language or dialect, and to concentrate on characters on the
fringes of society, where they struggle to maintain their hopes and aspirations, but ultimately
slide into disillusionment and despair.

With no uniquely American tradition to guide him, O’Neill introduced or revived many
techniques that have since become staples of American theater: repetition of actions or
phrases to underscore dramatic intent; use of symbolic masks or costumes (as in Greek
theater); use of archetypal themes from classical religion or mythology; and revival of the
Elizabethan devices of soliloquy (a speech made by one character onstage in which he talks
to himself or herself and reveals his/her thoughts without addressing a listener) and aside (a
piece of dialogue intended for the audience and supposedly not heard by the other characters
onstage) to reveal a character’s inner state.
O’Neill’s plays (like the works of Twain and Whitman) were based on the many odd jobs he
held before becoming a playwright. He looked deeply into all his characters, producing
searing portraits of desire and frustration, delusion and failure. With his experimental flair,
his enormous output (he wrote 32 full-length plays and 20 one-act plays, as well as numerous
manuscripts), and his high aspirations for the theater, Eugene O’Neill dominated American
drama in his generation. His plays were widely produced abroad, and he was the only
American playwright to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature (1936).

Arthur Miller: Playwright of Our Social Conscience

The post-World War II years brought two important figures to prominence in American
drama: Arthur Miller (1915-2005) and Tennessee Williams (1911-1983). They remain the
dominant figures of the second half of the 20th century. Miller and Williams represent the two
principal movements in modern American drama: realism, and realism combined with an
attempt at something more imaginative. From the beginning, American playwrights have
tried to break away from the strict realism of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov and to blend it
with a more poetic form of expression. Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), Williams’ The
Glass Menagerie (1944) and Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (1938) are some of the best
examples of this style of writing.

  Miller’s best work, Death of a Salesman,  is one of the most successful in fusing the realistic
and the imaginative; in all his other plays, however, Miller is the master of realism. He is a
true disciple of Henrik Ibsen, not only in his realistic technique, but in his concern about the
impact of society on his characters’ lives.

In Miller’s plays, the course of action and the development of characters depends not only on
the characters’ psychological makeup but also on the social, philosophical, and economic
atmosphere of their times. Miller’s most notable character, Willy Loman Death of a
Salesman,  is a self-deluded man, but he is also a product of the American dream of success
and a victim of the American business machine, which disposes of him when he has outlived
his usefulness.

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 witch hunts past and present (as in The
Crucible [1953]). He writes a plain, muscular prose that under the force of emotion often
becomes eloquent.

  

Tennessee Williams: Playwright of Our Souls

Although Tennessee Williams was Miller’s contemporary, his concern was not with social
matters, but with personal ones. In play after play, he probed the psychological complexities
of his characters, especially of his female characters: 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 spare, plain language, Williams’ writing is delicate and sensuous, often
colored with lush imagery and evocative rhythms. Miller’s characters are, by and large,
ordinary people with whom we identify because they are caught up in the social tensions of
our times. Williams’ characters are often women who are lost ladies, drowning in their own
neuroses, but somehow mirroring a part of our own complex psychological selves. In the
works of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, we see the two strongest strands in
American drama: pure realism, and realism blended with an imaginative, poetic sensibility.

Contemporary American Theater

In the mid-19th century, realism in drama was conceived as a revolt against crude

theatricalism. Currently there is a revolt against realism itself, and a move toward more
theatricalism, with its emphasis on stage effects and imaginative settings. Once again,
American drama is changing to reflect the changing attitudes of American theater-going
audiences. Dramatists today have the freedom to express their deepest feelings, whatever they
may be, in any form they choose—provided that their approach can be made comprehensible
to an audience and touch their emotions.

Source from wikipedia