Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1970s

Voices, Documents, New Interpretations

Michael Vanden Heuvel

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350022607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

The Decades of Modern American Drama series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their works to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include:
* David Rabe: The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel; Sticks and Bones; and Streamers;
* Sam Shepard: Curse of the Starving Class; Buried Child; and True West;
* Ntozake Shange: For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf; Spell #7; and Boogie-Woogie Landscapes
* Richard Foreman: Sophia = (Wisdom) Part 3; The Cliffs; Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation; and Rhoda in Potatoland (Her Fall-Starts).

1

Introduction to the 1970s

Mike Vanden Heuvel

Overview

The seventies are just the garbage of the sixties.

ROBERT PATRICK, KENNEDY’S CHILDREN¹

Disco balls, streakers and stayin’ alive. Oil shock, long lines for gas, and auto design misadventures like the Pacer, Volare and Pinto. Personal space, personal consciousness and the first personal computers. Latchkey kids, POSSLQs and palimony. Archie Bunker, tying yellow ribbons ’round the old oak tree, and the Bicentennial celebrations. Hardhats beating on Hippies, more hardhats – this time with long hair and Afros (‘the industrial Woodstock’) – striking at the GM plant in Lordstown. Jimmy Carter’s personal relationship with Christ. Wheel of Fortune, Roots and Saturday Night Live. The rise of the Sunbelt, the ascent of the redneck and the ‘southernization’ of America.² Prop 13 in California and propping up South Vietnam. Skateboarders, bored housewives and Microsoft’s first motherboard. The rise of the Imperial Presidency and Gerald Ford’s (or was it Chevy Chase’s?) pratfalls. The Me Decade, ‘getting it’ at Esalen and getting mad as hell and not taking it anymore. White flight to the suburbs following the Milliken decision, a Skylab in space and the flight of a white seagull named Jonathan. Jesus freaks, Krishnas, Moonies and the 700 Club. The first age of terrorism for Americans. Fallen torches and torched helicopters, initially in Saigon as America retreated from its first military defeat and then, at decade’s end, burning in the Iranian desert.

Living in the decade

Domestic life

The entire period was mired in stagflation – the unique situation of rampant inflation existing simultaneously with high unemployment – and rising prices acted as a multiplier to further dampen purchasing power. At the same time, the 1970s saw the rise of the money revolution and dramatic increases in consumer debt with the aggressive marketing of credit cards and the signifying of debt as something other than moral turpitude. Baby boomers were entering their teen years, causing family expenses to skyrocket. Consumer debt exploded in 1975 to $197 billion and then doubled to $315 billion in just four years. In the face of high interest rates and rising costs, many Americans shifted from acting like bankers frugally managing their money to investors and speculators – utilizing the gradual deregulation of the financial sector to explore every option from money market funds to discount stock brokerage firms and mutual funds – whose aim was to create wealth that at least kept pace with inflation.

A perfect storm of economic factors caused a simultaneous decline in American productivity, trade and wages. When the oil embargos hit in 1973 and 1979, the economy was in no shape to rebound and so economic stress was widespread. Healthcare costs were an issue then as they are today: after Canada passed its single-payer system in 1971, there was interest across both political parties to do the same in America. Progress stalled, although the HMO Act became law in 1973.

In 1970, fully 61 per cent of Americans were classified as middle class (the number in 2015 is 50 per cent, with the majority slipping into the ranks of the lower middle class). Oil prices, not surprisingly, represented the biggest shift in consumption. While in 1950, 38 per cent of America’s energy was produced by petroleum, by 1975 this had risen to 45 per cent. When the Middle East consortium OPEC embargoed oil to the US, the shockwaves were felt across all sectors of the economy. Prices jumped from 30 cents per gallon to $1.20 (this during a decade when wages rose but 0.05 per cent while prices rose at an average of 8.5 per cent). Soon after 1975, American dependence on petroleum products as the source of energy began slowly to erode, and by 2012 they were closer to 1950 figures (38 per cent of total energy).

Things we bought

Average yearly salaries across the decade were only $7,500, but the cost of living was of course much lower: first-class stamps were 6 cents, steak went for under $1.20 per pound, and coffee – by the pound – cost a fifth of what a latte does in 2015. The popular Hot Wheels toy vehicles were about 70 cents apiece, and one could buy furniture for Barbie’s house – inflatable! – for about $2. Real cars were running around $3,500 in 1970, and this climbed to $6,000 by the end of the decade. One could invest in the more fuel-efficient (but woefully underpowered) disasters that appeared after the oil crisis, like the Ford Pinto, and only shell out $3,000 in 1979. Cadillacs were the power car of choice, and the Lincoln Continental Mark III could, if memory serves, take up the space of the Pacer, Gremlin and Vega combined. Among other adult toys, those with greater disposable income invested in the first portable phones, though, as their nicknames attest (‘Brick Phones’), they were not especially mobile.

For the kids, Americans continued to buy dolls for girls until the middle of the decade, when the rise of women in the labour force and the nascent women’s movement caused toys to be advertised without the strong gender marking that characterized post-war culture. By the end of the decade, ‘man dolls’ for boys were widespread and included G. I. Joe, Stretch Armstrong, Evil Knievel and Colonel Steve Austin, aka the Six Million Dollar Man. Similarly, toy marketing for girls often featured women as doctors, office workers and scientists. Indeed, toys are much more strongly marketed by gender in the twenty-first century than in the 1970s. As in any decade, there were fads that produced must-have items: Pet Rocks were hot mid-decade, but were soon supplanted by Cabbage Patch Kids in 1978. The Rubik’s Cube rounded out the decade, arriving in 1979. More traditionally, the Etch-A-Sketch was still popular, as was Lego (though they didn’t make movies based on them as they do today). Board games, along with the venerable Monopoly, Candyland, Stratego and Scrabble, included Mastermind, Mousetrap, Battleship and Boggle. (Remarkably, many of these games enjoy a digital afterlife as contemporary apps.) With Dungeons and Dragons, however, the nature of the board game changed forever: between the elaborate role-playing and the competition to reign as Dragon Master, the game swept the country after 1974.

While electric toys – train sets, Easy-Bake Ovens, those vibrating football games and the like – opened the decade, by 1979 toys were increasingly electronic. Top of the line video games, like Pong, Space Invaders and Galaxian, could only be played at arcades, as home gaming equipment was in its infancy: the Atari 400 would not debut until 1979. Still, plenty of LED-encrusted games were available for home use, ranging from the Lite-Brite board, Simon (a Q&A game with moving, lighted panels) and the first toy calculators for parents wanting education mixed in with the fun. As environmental awareness increased following the first Earth Day celebration in 1970, and concerns grew after the Love Canal scandal of the mid-1970s (in which a school was found to be built on 22,000 tons of toxic waste), concerned parents could purchase a Johnny Horizon Environmental Test Kit.

Americans were beginning to learn how to overstuff themselves: the average diet consisted of 3,300 calories per day, up 300 calories from the leaner 1950s and indicative of trends today (3,800 calories). Red meats were in, eggs were in decline and the movement to consume more fresh fruits and vegetables was still two decades away: Americans ate 13 per cent more canned vegetables in the 1970s than they would by the end of the century. With more women moving into the workplace, traditional family dining and the hierarchy of domestic labour were altered. The appearance of toaster ovens and eventually the commercially produced home microwave oven (for the latter, between 1970 and 1975 sales jumped from 40,000 to over a million) made it simpler to reheat precooked foods at home. But it was also a golden age of fast food, and as more Americans dined out they drank less milk but more than made up for it in increased cheese consumption. In 1970 there were about 30,000 fast food locales in the county, but by 1979 this jumped to 140,000 (some of the long-retired franchises included Biff Burger, Burger Chef and – in the wake of the success of Kentucky Fried Chicken – Mahalia Jackson’s Glori-Fried Chicken). Between fast food parlours and conventional restaurants, Americans spent roughly 25 per cent of their food budget dining away from home in 1970: by 1999 that number was 48 per cent. Still, the carbonated beverage market was relatively narrow by comparison, and as a result Americans received only 16 per cent of their refined and added sugars via sodas, compared to 22 per cent today.

Still, with the rise of the environmental movement, ‘natural’ was in and granola made its appearance alongside the first salad bars and home woks. The Atkins diet created a stir in 1972, and pumpkin and apple pie had to make room for zucchini bread. Organically raised beef helped per capita consumption of red meat reach its highest total ever in 1976 (94 pounds per year) at a time when meats were not lean by today’s standards (35 per cent fat on average).

BOX 1.1: FOOD FADS APPEARING IN THE 1970s

Orville Redenbacher Gourmet Popping Corn (1970)

Hamburger Helper (1970)

Snapple (1972)

Stove Top Stuffing (1972)

French bread pizza (1974)

Soft frozen yogurt (1974)

Pop Rocks – along with the urban legend that they could explode stomachs when consumed with carbonated colas (1975)

Starburst Fruit Chews (1976)

Jelly Belly Jelly Beans (1976)

Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream (1978)

Perrier bottled water (1978). By 1997, American consumption of bottled water had increased 908 per cent.

Work life

Few decades have seen the fortunes of the working class rise and fall so dramatically. The 1970s began with labour seeming to be solidly behind the Democrats and poised to make huge gains, but ended with working class movements in disarray and the lower working class shifting politically to the New Right. Essentially labour was caught between the support it received from the Democrats with regard to its economic and workplace struggles, and on the other hand the animosity felt by its rank and file toward liberalism’s cultural politics: race and gender, the war in Vietnam, the environment and the perceived erosion of America’s manifest destiny. As Jefferson Cowie notes, jazz musician Gil-Scott Heron illuminated the conflict with the line ‘America don’t know whether it wants to be Matt Dillon [the straight-shooting hero of the television series Gunsmoke] or Bob Dylan.’³ Nixon expertly mined the discontent and incorporated labour into his ‘Silent Majority’, as evidenced by the huge (and initially violent) 1970 demonstration of ‘hardhats’ in Manhattan against Hippies in support of Nixon’s policies in Vietnam. The president won his landslide 1972 re-election over the pro-labour George McGovern in part by carrying the lower middle class vote. Despite transformative gains by the working class in striking against large corporations such as GM and unionizing the intransigent South in the first half of the decade (particularly the J. P. Stevens plant in Roanoke Rapids, NC, later dramatized in the Academy Award-winning film Norma Rae), the recession of 1974–5 all but ended labour’s hope of expanding its political and economic influence. The landmark Humphrey– Hawkins Full Employment Act languished under President Carter and died a slow death at the hand of both free-market conservatives and liberal economists.

The other seismic shift in American labour was the increasing number of women entering the workforce. In 1970, 30 per cent of women with children were working outside the home, but the number leaped to 43 per cent by 1976 and continued to climb well into the next decade.⁴ The weak economy, which shifted job opportunities from manufacture to the service sectors, created a double-edged sword for women: more jobs opened that did not require advanced training but also did not provide anything close to equal pay or equal opportunity for advancement.

Society

Crime and punishment

The decade had its share of high-profile crime and introduced the image of the serial killer to mainstream media.

BOX 1.2: AMERICAN CRIME IN THE 1970s

David Berkowitz, aka ‘The Son of Sam’, terrorized New York City for over a year, killing six and wounding seven with a high-powered handgun while sending taunting letters to the authorities that kept the city in constant fear. The San Francisco-based Zodiac killer, whose murders began around 1962, continued and achieved national attention until they ended abruptly in 1978. In a titillating high-profile abduction case, heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 and within a month appeared (as ‘Tania’) with her captors as part of a bank robbery in San Francisco.

More generally the 1970s are remembered as a time when urban crime exploded and America’s cities – particularly in the Rust Belt, but New York City as well – were perceived as descending into something close to lawlessness. Crime rates soared: compared to 1960, 225 per cent more robberies, a 145 per cent increase in rapes, and murders up more than 100 per cent, much of it youth crime. White flight to the suburbs and Sun Belt and the loss of up to 40 per cent of manufacturing jobs (in cities like Detroit) reduced populations in America’s major cities and caused widespread disinvestment in urban retail and housing. The decrepit infrastructure, prominent red-light districts and graffiti-covered subways became the emblem of such decline, and the best anecdotal evidence of the chaos is the widespread looting and violence that occurred during the Northeast blackout of 1977 (which did not happen during the first great blackout of 1965).

But the biggest events related to crime actually were judicial. In 1972 the Supreme Court made consistent application of the death penalty mandatory, which in the short run created a moratorium on executions based on 8th Amendmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Boxes
• Acknowledgements
• Biographical Note and Notes on Contributors
• General Preface
• 1. Introduction to the 1970s
• 2. American Theatre in the 1970s
• 3. ‘An Idiom that is a Kind of Vision of the World’: David Rabe’s Plays of the 1970s – The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel (1971), Sticks and Bones (1971) and Streamers (1975)
• 4. Sam Shepard: Curse of the Starving Class (1977), Buried Child (1978) and True West (1980)
• 5. Ntozake Shange: For colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1975), spell #7 (1979) and boogie woogie landscapes (1979)
• 6. Richard Foreman: Sophia = (Wisdom) Part 3: The Cliffs (1972), Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation (1975) and Rhoda in Potatoland (Her Fall-Starts) (1975)
• Afterword
• Documents
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright