Fifty Modern and Contemporary Dramatists

Maggie Gale, John Deeney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317596219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

Fifty Modern and Contemporary and Dramatists is a critical introduction to the work of some of the most important and influential playwrights from the 1950s to the present day. The figures chosen are among the most widely studied by students of drama, theatre and literature and include such celebrated writers as:

• Samuel Beckett

• Caryl Churchill

• Anna Deavere Smith

• Jean Genet

• Sarah Kane

• Heiner Müller

• Arthur Miller

• Harold Pinter

• Sam Shephard

Each short essay is written by one of an international team of academic experts and offers a detailed analysis of the playwright's key works and career. The introduction provides an historical and theatrical context to the volume, which provides an invaluable overview of modern and contemporary drama.

FIFTY MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS

EDWARD ALBEE (1928–)

Writing in 1960, Albee remarked: ‘Careers are funny things. They begin mysteriously and, just as mysteriously, they can end; and I am at just the very beginning of what I hope will be a long and satisfying life in the theatre’ (Albee 1963: 9). Albee’s career has certainly been a long one with his most recent play, Laying An Egg, awaiting its world premiere at the Signature Theatre in New York. But satisfying? Only Albee would know, but it is certainly true that his career has had its ups and downs, the latter marked by sometimes savage rejection by American reviewers and audiences. As for the ups, few dramatists have enjoyed such a meteoric rise to success so relatively early in their careers. The Zoo Story made Albee’s name when it was produced Off-Broadway in 1960 followed with considerable success by The American Dream in the following year, but it was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? that made him famous when it was produced on Broadway in 1962, running for 664 shows. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was followed by a respectfully received adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1963) and then by Tiny Alice, which seemed to baffle the New York reviewers, and perhaps its audiences too, when it ran on Broadway in 1964. Worse was however to come: Malcolm, another adaptation, was critically panned and closed within a week in 1966; and over the next decade and a half a succession of his plays received at best mixed reviews and closed after brief or decidedly modest runs, while Albee himself struggled with his alcohol dependency. Only one of the plays of this period, A Delicate Balance (1966), has since been rehabilitated as a major work in his oeuvre, even if its merits are still critically debated. This long ‘down’ in Albee’s career saw him turn his back on the mainstream American theatre world in favour of writing for small provincial, university or even foreign theatres. This decision eventually resulted in a revival of Albee’s fortunes, initiated by the New York success of Three Tall Women (1994; premiered 1991, Vienna) and followed by a successful revival of A Delicate Balance and the American and British premieres of The Play About the Baby (1998, London; 2001, New York) and The Goat or Who is Sylvia? (2002, New York; 2004, London).

The early short plays that established Albee’s reputation as a dramatist were experimental in form and in content savagely attacked the status quo of the post-war Eisenhower years in America. Introducing elements of surrealism and the fashionable absurdism associated with Beckett and Ionesco – both of whom he admired – Albee created dramatic parables of the human condition and at the same time satirized what he saw as the American enslavement to consumerist materialism and the breakdown of authentic communication and genuinely meaningful relationships. The Zoo Story (1960) dramatizes the meeting of two men on a park bench in Central Park: one, Jerry, is socially marginalized, a volatile existentialist philosopher of the streets; the other, Peter, is the embodiment of educated, middle-class, conformist and – as it turns out – deeply repressed American manhood. Subjected to Jerry’s verbal interrogation and storytelling and eventual physical attacks – first tickling and then pushing and punching – Peter is provoked out of his habitual passivity and, in a fury, struggles with his antagonist for possession of the park bench, culminating in Jerry’s impaling of himself on his own knife, which Peter is using to defend himself. Central to the play’s meaning, however construed – and The Zoo Story has been subjected to a variety of interpretations – is the story of Jerry and the dog, which Jerry narrates and performs as something like a play within the play. The dog belongs to the landlady of the hellish brownstone rooming-house where Jerry has a room and it terrorizes him every time he passes through the entrance hall of the building. He tells of how he tries to make the dog love him through kindness, feeding him hamburgers when they meet. When this fails to curb the animal’s aggression Jerry decides to kill him by mixing the meat with rat poison. This strategy also fails, as the dog miraculously recovers. But Jerry is glad that his ‘friend’ – for that is how he has come to think of him – has survived since he hopes that they can now make genuine contact, even love each other. But although they now look at each other and have achieved a kind of understanding that allows Jerry to pass unchallenged, they have failed to make genuine contact. Instead, they ‘feign indifference’ when they meet, each pursuing his solitary existence, no longer trying to reach each other. The moral of the story, Jerry tells Peter, is that neither kindness nor cruelty ‘creates any effect beyond themselves’ (Albee 1963: 35); it is the two combined that makes ‘the teaching emotion’ (Albee 1963: 36). Jerry regards his experience with the dog as possibly the first attempt at genuine contact with another, since to start with people is too difficult; and it may be that his encounter with Peter, even though it ends in his death, should be seen as his application of this moral to human relationships.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is preoccupied by many of the same themes that animated Albee’s early short plays but in a different key. Working this time within the conventions of naturalism, he once again explores the need for a genuine form of human contact and how the ‘teaching emotion’ that combines cruelty and the desire to love can exorcize illusion and give way, however precariously, to the recognition of reality. George and Martha are trapped in a life of mutual verbal laceration on a small New England college campus, where George is a failed professor of history and Martha is the deeply dissatisfied daughter of the college president. The action of the play consists of a late-night drinking session with a younger couple, Nick and Honey, who have been invited back by Martha after a faculty party. Energized by having an audience, George and Martha perform their destructive verbal routines with particularly cruel inventiveness, at first to the embarrassment of the younger couple but, as the alcohol flows and their own façade of marital contentment is removed, increasingly with their participation and collusion.

Central to George and Martha’s tortured relationship is their childlessness – a lack they have compensated for through their elaborate and long-held fantasy of having brought up a son. When George discovers that Martha has broken the rules of the game by revealing the child’s ‘existence’ to Honey their ritualized verbal game-playing takes a new and decisive turn – George decides to kill off their imagined child and bring their hitherto sustaining mutual fantasy to an end. In Act III, which Albee titles ‘Exorcism’, this is what happens. Supposedly having received a telegram from Western Union informing them of his death, George forces Martha – whose attachment to the fantasy amounts to a kind of possession – to accept his demise as he recites in Latin the words of the ‘Mass of the Dead’. Albee’s stage direction indicates a ‘hint of communion’ (Albee 1965: 138) between them as the exorcism takes effect, although it remains to be seen whether George and Martha, and perhaps even Nick and Honey, can put their marriages on a new and better footing as a result of what has passed between them. Bereft of the fantasized son, Martha’s answer to the question posed by the play’s title is an honest but deeply anxious admission that ‘I … am … George. I … am …’ (Albee 1965: 140).

Failed marriage, a dead son (this time a real one) and a profound fear of the existential void are again much in evidence in A Delicate Balance (1966). The death of their boy Teddy signalled the sexual and emotional end of Tobias and Agnes’ marriage; the fact that they still have a daughter, Julia, has been no consolation, especially as she has returned home again after the failure of yet another of her marriages. And when their best friends Harry and Edna arrive on a visit it is because, amid the genteel desolation of their own sexless and loveless life together, they have been overcome by a nameless fear that drives them from their home. The main action of the play concerns what Tobias and Agnes will do with their friends, who seem ready to leave their own house for good and move in permanently with their reluctant hosts. In the end, Harry and Edna leave, aware that even their lengthy friendship is not enough to ensure a decisive commitment by Tobias and Agnes to their continuing refuge against the existential void. The ‘delicate balance’ Tobias and Agnes have achieved, which makes anything in the nature of significant change impossible, allows – indeed compels – Tobias to remain weak and indecisive, unable to take on the burdens of love and responsibility, and permits Agnes to stay protected by an armour-plating of elaborate verbiage. Only Agnes’ alcoholic sister Claire speaks the truth of their death-in-life condition, even if she cannot rise above it herself.

However mixed Albee’s critical fortunes have been, at least in America, he has remained at the forefront of stylistic and dramaturgical experiment in contemporary American theatre. If the naturalism of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or A Delicate Balance has been his mainstay, audiences have also encountered the absurdism of The American Dream, the theatricalist ‘postmodernism’ of Fragments (1993) or The Play About the Baby (1998), the brilliantly inventive device of presenting one character at different stages in her life as if they were distinct persons in Three Tall Women. In terms of genre, Albee has ceaselessly forged new and distinctive ways of blending seriousness with humour, the tragic and the comic, often insisting that however grim the subject matter – isolation, non-communication, irretrievable loss, death and dying – an element of slapstick is essential to the success of his work. The Goat or Who is Sylvia?, which reinforced Albee’s return to public and critical favour when it won the Tony award for Best New Play on Broadway when it premiered there in 2002, demonstrated that the 74-year-old playwright had lost none of his commitment to extending the boundaries of mainstream American theatre. Subtitled ‘notes toward a definition of tragedy’, The Goat makes its provocative contribution to the ongoing debate on sexuality and the nature of marriage in America by dramatizing what happens when a long and happily married man, a successful and respected member of the professional bourgeoisie, is forced to confess to having fallen in love with and having had sexual relations with a goat, whom he has named Sylvia. Martin’s wife, Stevie, previously so assured in her marital contentment, is distraught; even Billy, Martin’s teenage son who has discovered his own homosexuality, is horrified by his father’s revelation of his feelings and actions. Absurd but not absurdist, at times hilarious but also deeply painful, The Goat suggests that even tolerant liberal Americans (and of course others) have not come to terms with the mysteries of sexuality and its attendant emotions. As it was in the early 1960s, with Jerry and Peter on their benches in Central Park, the stage for Edward Albee is the place that must take everyone, even the most aware, out of their comfort zones.

Brian Crow

Key works

Albee, Edward (1963) The American Dream and The Zoo Story, New York: Signet.

——(1965) Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

——(1968) A Delicate Balance, London: Cape.

——(2004) The Goat or Who is Sylvia?, London: Methuen Drama.

Further reading

Bigsby, C.W.E. (ed.) (1975) Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Bottoms, Stephen (ed.) (2005) The Cambridge Companion to Edward Albee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

APRIL DE ANGELIS (1960–)

April De Angelis announced her opposition to the present UK government’s educational policies by discussing her school experience in terms of theatrical values that remain a constant in her career. ‘Being inside the complex world of a play with its debates, strategies, motivations and allegiances was brilliant for confidence and developing a love of language.’¹ She began her career as an actress with the London-based feminist company Monstrous Regiment and it was to feminist companies of the 1980s that she owed her early writing opportunities. Her first play Breathless (1987) was a prizewinner at the Second Wave Young Women’s Writing Festival at the Albany Empire, London. In 1991, as writer-in-residence for subsidized company Paines Plough, she co-organized a ‘salon’ to explore the current upsurge of modern critical theory, already impacting upon cinema (and, as she noted, ‘bloody hard to grasp’)², in terms of its implications for feminist playwrights. The fluidity of her own dramaturgy, with its constantly shifting performance styles – from crosstalk to poetry, cartoonish surrealism to naturalism – has made it possible to explore the formation of female identity and show the interactions between political power and personal motivation within a range of theatrical spaces. Her preference for writing to commission has led to her engagement with an unusually wide variety of topics, from erotica in her adaptation of Fanny Hill (1991) to eighteenth-century theatre politics in her companion piece to Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, A Laughing Matter (2002), and from her libretto for Errolyn Wallen’s opera The Silent Twins (2007) to her West End success Jumpy (2011).

Many of her plays explore lives obscured and marginalized in conventional histories. Rather than adopting a single viewpoint, however, her approach is to probe the conflicts and contradictions within them. The most critically acclaimed of her early plays, Ironmistress (1989), about the nineteenth-century industrialist Martha Darby, explored a woman’s enterprise as both empowering and corrupting. Although the budget only permitted two performers, one of its strengths, as Geraldine Cousin points out, is a breadth of vision, the way it is ‘haunted by the lives of other women … marginalised and abandoned’ (Cousin 1996: 60). Martha has the drive to run an ironworks but never breaks the cycle of profiteering; her daughter, Little Cog, replicates the experience that shaped her mother’s harshness by entering a loveless marriage. However, inescapably lodged within the imagination of both players in this individual tragedy is Shanny Pinns, worker and whore, her hands scarlet and cracking from washing the ironstone in freezing water – a spectre born of Martha’s capitalist guilt and her sexual rage at the sight of her husband making love to an iron statue of Shanny. Little Cog enters the persona of Shanny to imagine different fates for her, enacting a statue, a ghost, and a highway-woman on a powerful horse. In her century, Little Cog can only dream of a woman who might reshape the fragments of the past in order to ‘fly’. But to the audience this is in the realm of possibility – precisely because the vision is mediated through informed and committed actors, whose constant self-transformations reflect that hope for self-determination and freely exercised talent.

Playhouse Creatures (1993), the play for which De Angelis is best known, was commissioned at a point when explicitly political and feminist theatre were in decline. De Angelis felt she was writing ‘against the grain of the times’,³ and this is reflected in the crosscurrents of the action. On the on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Alphabetical list of entries
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• FIFTY MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY DRAMATISTS
• Index