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Fall 2008 Course |
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American Theatre 1255 |
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Professor Susan Harris Smith |
"Real art has the capacity to make us nervous"
Susan Sontag
It has been said that 'historical plays provide a special opportunity to examine the transactions between imaginative literature and the external world, which literature variously attempts to imitate, to attack, to influence, and to transcend: for historical writings make a greater pretense at engaging with reality than do writings whose fictiveness we accept from the start. . . . The drama is one site in which the historical narrative can be reified or imaginatively tested by employing a skepticism toward absolutes, a mediation between extremes, an absorption in the relationship of private and public experience."
Modern and contemporary American plays skeptically explore two essential questions: "What is America?" and "Who is an American?" from a number of approaches: America as a political construct (a democratic republic with all the conflict inherent in the paradox); America as the embodiment of abstractions and values (freedoms, rights, dreams); America as a country taken from the native people and built by waves of immigrants; and America as a mythic place, the site of "the American Dream: of unrestrained individual achievement.
Modern writers such as Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams and our contemporaries such as David Mamet, Tony Kushner, Sam Shepard and Suzan-Lori Parks place particular emphasis race, ethnicity, class, gender and sexuality, stressing the social and political implications of the dominance of commerce, the loss of formation of a positive national identity, the disintegration or affirmation of the individual, the acceptance or marginalizing of the "other," and the exploration of American "languages."
For instance, in Pickling, The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and The America Play, her reclamation projects for the lost and voiceless, Suzan-Lori Parks confronts historical events, questions stereotypes, and debunks cultural myths not only to challenge and re-write history but also to right history. Similarly, August Wilson in Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and Adrienne Kennedy in A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White both consider the plight of the African American woman trying to claiming her identity.
Eugene O'Neill dramatizes American imperialism and slavery in The Emperor Jones; John Guare examines a Post-Civil War Utopia based on Emersonian and feminist ideals; David Mamet skewers capitalism in American Buffalo as does Tennessee Williams in The Glass Menagerie; David Rabe faces the horror of Vietnam in Streamers; Arthur Kopit analyzes genocide and the commercialism and creation of a mythic "Wild West" in Indians as does Sam Shepard in True West.
In Tony Kushner's epic Angels in America and Perestroika, the disease-ridden American body politic, inhabited by rabbis, drag queens, housewives, nurses, doctors and angels as well as historical figures, such as Roy Cohn and Ethel Rosenberg, is dissected to reveal the pill addictions, loneliness, mental illness, homelessness, sexual repression, and political oppression which plagued the westward migration of Eastern European Jews to America and of Mormons to Utah as well as the targets of the McCarthy hearings and the AIDS crisis.
In the musical Assassins! Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman critique the myth of the happy ending dramatizing the fearful, psychologically vulnerable murderers who altered history and asks a fundamental question of American life: does democracy's championing of individualism also nourish narcissistic egotism that threatens any notion of responsibility to the larger community.