Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1960s

Voices, Documents, New Interpretations

Mike Sell

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350153622
• 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documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material.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 plays to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include:
* Edward Albee: The American Dream (1960), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), A Delicate Balance (1966) and Tiny Alice (1964 );
* Amiri Baraka: Dutchman (1964), The Slave (1964) and Slaveship (1967);
* Adrienne Kennedy: Funnyhouse of a Negro (1964), Cities in Bezique ( The Owl Answers and A Beast's Story, 1969), and A Rat's Mass (1967);
* Jean-Claude van Itallie: American Hurrah (1966), The Serpent (1968) and War (1963).

1

Introduction: Living in the 1960s

Mike Sell

There is no decade in US history argued about as much or as passionately as the 1960s. When conservative pundits decry the ‘decline of family values’, when crowds gather to protest police brutality, when politicians run against ‘elites’ and claim to represent the ‘silent majority’, when college students demand ‘safe spaces’, they are commenting, whether they know it or not, on the 1960s and the people and events that shaped that moment and our own.

Why?

The 1960s was a decade when the ‘Establishment’ – the institutions, people and ideas that had dominated American society since the end of the Second World War – was challenged from every direction.

Black Americans led the charge, organizing sit-ins, freedom rides, boycotts and demonstrations to expose the nation’s racial caste system and achieve landmark legal reforms across the country. The founding of Students for a Democratic Society in 1962 heralded the emergence of the ‘New Left’. In 1965, Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association joined with Filipino American farmworkers to strike for higher wages. Feminism’s second wave broke in 1963 when Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. In the summer of 1969, transgendered people, drag queens and homeless youth took to the streets around Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn to protest police harassment, igniting the LGBTQ rights movement.

The 1960s was a momentous decade for conservatism, too. In 1960, Barry Goldwater published The Conscience of a Conservative, and William F. Buckley, founder of National Review magazine, invited a group of young people to his estate in Connecticut, helping them found Young Americans for Freedom. Yes, Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater lost by a landslide in 1964, but Ronald Reagan was elected Governor of California in 1966, and, even more momentously, Richard Nixon won the Presidency in 1968, doing so with the support of the ‘great silent majority of my fellow Americans’.

Television beamed into middle-class living rooms new forms of entertainment and the gritty reality of political assassination, war and the struggle for social justice. The box office success of Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate in 1968 put the nail in the coffin of the old Hollywood Studio System. As we’ll discuss in Chapter 2, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway and regional residential, identity-based and activist theatres challenged the big producers and geriatric aesthetics of the Great White Way. African Americans founded dozens of literary and cultural journals and neighbourhood cultural centres as part of the Black Arts Movement. Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton wrote drugged-out, sexed-up comics that appealed to countercultural sensibilities and rejected the Comics Code Authority. The Los Angeles Free Press rolled off the press in 1964, the first of the underground newspapers. Meanwhile, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, computer scientists invented the internet and video games.

And then there was Vietnam. US military involvement in the conflict between North and South escalated precipitously in the early 1960s. Over three million Americans would eventually serve in the war, half of them in combat. Almost sixty thousand Americans would die there, and thousands came home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. As many as a million Vietnamese – both combatants and civilians – lost their lives. The anti-war movement drew thousands to neighbourhood meetings, public demonstrations and violent clashes with police. Opposition to the American presence in Vietnam was one of the contributing factors to the events of May 1968, when a student revolt in Paris led to a governmental crisis and uprisings around the world.

So it’s not surprising that the 1960s remains a subject that is as controversial as it is compelling. But, as significant as the changes to the political system, media and the global order were, it was also a decade when everyday life, work and technology changed. Understanding all of these will help us better understand how and why the playwrights, theatre artists and performers of the 1960s did what they did the way they did.

The baby boom

As historian Landon Jones memorably put it, nine months after the end of the Second World War ‘the cry of the baby was heard across the land.’¹ In 1946, 3.4 million babies were born in the US, 650,000 more than the year before; between 1954 and 1964, four million babies were born every year. By 1964, there were 76.4 million people in the US under the age of eighteen, almost 40 per cent of the population.² This so-called ‘baby boom’ reshaped education, marketing, popular culture, the labour and housing markets and much more.³

The boom had its downside. There was talk of a ‘generation gap’. Many young people felt a sharp sense of suspicion towards their elders, captured best by the activists who warned, ‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty.’ Indeed, so pervasive was this distrust that a veritable ‘counterculture’ emerged, exemplified by the ‘hippies’, who rejected middle-class (i.e. ‘square’) standards of dress and decorum, wore their hair long and embraced an ethos of anarchic joy and altruism. Mistrust of the Establishment wasn’t just felt by the hippies. As historian Rebecca Klatch notes, ‘While thousands of youth [joined] protests on the left, thousands of others mobilized on the right’, including those who would engineer the brash, anti-establishment movement that led to the election of President DonaldTrump in 2016.⁴

The golden age of capitalism

Between 1940 and 1960, the gross national product of the US grew by more than 500 per cent.⁵ Low interest rates, the construction of a national highway system, the expansion of the suburban housing market, the GI Bill (which subsidized college educations for thousands of veterans) and the maturation of $200 billion in war bonds enabled unprecedented prosperity for many Americans. In 1960, the average family in the United States earned almost 60 per cent more than they did in 1950.⁶ By the end of the decade,average annual income would increase 70.7 per cent to $11,419.⁷ Meanwhile, the cost of food, clothing and housing dropped, increasing the amount of discretionary spending available to consumers.⁸

Prosperity wasn’t evenly distributed. Unemployment among black Americans was double that of whites.⁹ Blue-collar workers saw their prosperity decline, though not always in ways that were easy to detect. As Sharon Smith explains, ‘During the years when wages were rising, working conditions were deteriorating.’¹⁰ In exchange for higher wages, unions signed contracts requiring higher productivity, less vacation time and limited sick leave, alongside automation, assembly-line speed-ups and forced overtime. Thus, though the number of manufacturing jobs grew by almost a third between 1950 and 1968, workers worked more hours. Net corporate profits doubled.

If things were getting progressively worse for African Americans and skilled labour, they remained as bad as ever for the poor. As Michael Harrington showed in his 1962 book The Other America, 25 per cent of the nation lived in poverty, mostly concentrated in city slums and isolated rural communities.¹¹ The Johnson administration launched its War on Poverty in 1964, an omnibus set of policies that included Medicaid and Medicare, Head Start, an increase in the minimum wage, subsidized housing, cost-of-living increases for social security, and food stamps. As a result, the poverty rate was halved from 22.4 per cent in 1959 to 11.1 per cent in 1973.¹² But the poverty rate in the US remained two to three times higher than in European countries.¹³

Social forces, political movements

The 1960s witnessed tectonic shifts in the way people related to each other, to their communities and to their government. Indeed, historians often point to the decade as the moment when the traditional social and political structures were torn down and rebuilt, a decade when terms like ‘identity politics’ and phrases like ‘the personal is political’ signalled a new way of challenging and wielding power.

The labour market

Though the way that Americans worked – and what they did when they worked – didn’t change as dramatically as other aspects of life in the 1960s, there were a number of significant trends.

In 1960, 37.7 per cent of women worked in the civilian labour force, an increase of about 4 per cent since 1950. That number would rise to 43.3 per cent by 1970.¹⁴ But though more women worked, they didn’t earn as much as men and were often relegated to jobs with fewer opportunities. They were paid less for the same work, too. The median earnings of a full-time, year-round working-woman were $13,400 less than a man’s.¹⁵ Women were systemically denied promotions, too; many companies had policies that required a woman who married or became pregnant to quit. Not surprisingly, the number of women in corporate leadership positions remained flat during the decade.¹⁶ It was clear – at least to women – that the economic constraints determining women’s lives were unacceptable and feminism was a necessity.

The number of farms in the US declined precipitously between 1950 and 1960 (1.7 million fewer) and dropped by another million by 1970.¹⁷ At the same time, the size of those farms increased, as did the amount of workers on farms who were wage or salary workers, though the overall number of workers employed by farms dropped due to mechanization and other efficiency solutions.¹⁸ In other words, farms grew bigger and more industrialized, one of the factors that led to the farmworkers’ movement.

The information economy took off. Computer-based professions spiked starting in 1960, the first year data was collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.¹⁹ That growth was due to the development and dissemination of computer and robotic technologies for use by business, industry and the military (the first large-scale, multi-use network went online in 1969).²⁰ Engineering jobs continued the steady growth they had enjoyed since the 1940s.²¹

The fight against white supremacy

The US Supreme Court declared racial segregation illegal in 1954, but resistance to change was fierce, particularly in the South. ‘Whites only’ schools and water fountains were only part of the problem. Black Americans were denied access to political office and the vote. Property and wealth were grievously contingent. Harassment and violence were ubiquitous. Racist stereotypes saturated popular culture. As James Baldwin wrote in 1961, ‘To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.’²²

The challenge for anti-racist activists was threefold. First, they had to organize poor and working-class African Americans. Second, they had to devise forms of activism that undermined white supremacy in both its systemic and quotidian forms. And third, they had to draw the attention of the television networks, the federal government and the world.

It was in that spirit that four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College took their seats at a ‘whites only’ lunch counter on 1 February 1960. Though their action appeared to many as spontaneous, it was the culmination of months of organization and training on campuses across the region. Their courage inspired others to devise similar tactics, pressed leaders like Martin Luther King Jr to take more decisive action, and focused media and government attention on racist terror. This would not be the only time that a younger, more energetic, more creative and more radical group of activists would accelerate the pace of action and change.

Fourteen months after the sit-ins, the first Freedom Ride departed from the nation’s capital, headed for New Orleans. Testing a recent Supreme Court ruling on interstate travel, riders crossed the colour line at bus terminals across the South, meeting violence at virtually every stop. In Anniston, Alabama, one bus was firebombed; in Birmingham, infamous Public Safety Commissioner Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor delayed the police while Ku Klux Klan members mercilessly beat the passengers.

Connor’s hard line led movement leaders to select Birmingham as the focal point of the campaign. Sit-ins, marches and other acts of protest and civil disobedience led to the arrests of dozens, including King, who wrote his now celebrated ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, a document that affirmed the strategies of non-violent resistance, excoriated those who did not join the struggle and defended the right of people to come from around the country to help the cause. ‘Injustice anywhere’, King wrote, ‘is a threat to justice everywhere.’

Meanwhile, those who walked door to door registering black voters faced intense resistance. Medgar Evers was murdered on the front lawn of his Mississippi home on 12 June 1963, the day after President Kennedy called for the passage of a Civil Rights Act and two months before the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where King declared, ‘I Have a Dream.’ The next summer, the Civil Rights Act was put into law, mere weeks after James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were abducted and killed. National outrage provided momentum for t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Biographical Note and Notes on Contributors
• General Preface
• 1 Introduction: Living in the 1960s Mike Sell
• 2 American Theatre in the 1960s Mike Sell
• 3 Edward Albee Helen Shaw
• 4 Amiri Baraka Susan Stone-Lawrence
• 5 Adrienne Kennedy Lenora Inez Brown
• 6 Jean-Claude van Itallie Timothy Youker
• Documents Compiled and edited by Bradley Allen Markle
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright