3 - No Corner in Her Own House: What Is American About American Drama?

Summary

What has been understood to be “American” drama and what was understood to be the “Americanness” of American drama? Despite the enormous numbers of plays, pageants, burlesques, theatrical entertainments, and minstrel shows that have enlivened the American stage from the beginning, the traditionally constituted canon of American drama, a very small body of plays, proves to be a perpetually shifting conflation of American essentialism, moral and didactic purpose, and largely realistic dramaturgy written in English (with modest leeway for regional dialects) and is anything but an accurate reflector of what was transpiring in either dramatic literature or theatrical production. What the canon does reflect is an ideological and aesthetic consistency in interpretive values, although, obviously, some of the valued playwrights and plays and subgenres have changed as cultural and educational values and goals have shifted. The American dramatic canon also should be understood to be, for the most part, a product of the twentieth century; before Eugene O'Neill was heralded as America's first serious playwright, the critics largely were apologetic about the state of American drama as literature. And, of course, a canon was not a necessity until American drama became the object of academic study.

In the recent assessment of Marc Robinson, who in The Other American Drama (1994) strongly voices his resentment of the dramatis personae in the traditional American canon, the twentieth-century American dramatic canon begins with Eugene O'Neill and continues as a straight line through his “heirs,” including Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, William Saroyan, William Inge, Sidney Kingsley, Robert Sherwood, and August Wilson, an unwavering tradition marked by “overwhelming predictability,” “wet nostalgia,” “point-making social dramas,” “overheated historical verse plays,” and “drawing-room doodles with champagne chitchat” and informed by the nineteenth-century legacy of plot-based melodramas (i).