Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to First Edition
- Preface to Second Edition
- 1 The absent voice: American drama and the critic
- 2 Eugene O'Neill's Endgame
- 3 Tennessee Williams: the theatricalising self
- 4 Arthur Miller: the moral imperative
- 5 Edward Albee: journey to apocalypse
- 6 A Broadway interlude
- 7 Sam Shepard: imagining America
- 8 David Mamet: all true stories
- 9 The performing self
- 10 Redefining the centre: politics, race, gender
- 11 Beyond Broadway
- Notes
- Index
Preface to First Edition
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to First Edition
- Preface to Second Edition
- 1 The absent voice: American drama and the critic
- 2 Eugene O'Neill's Endgame
- 3 Tennessee Williams: the theatricalising self
- 4 Arthur Miller: the moral imperative
- 5 Edward Albee: journey to apocalypse
- 6 A Broadway interlude
- 7 Sam Shepard: imagining America
- 8 David Mamet: all true stories
- 9 The performing self
- 10 Redefining the centre: politics, race, gender
- 11 Beyond Broadway
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Ten years ago I wrote a study of twentieth-century American drama. It quickly outgrew its proposed length, expanding from one brief volume to three extensive ones. Eight years later I was asked to write a 30,000 word section of the Cambridge History of American Theatre. I had reached 170,000 words before I realised I had inadvertently written another book. Discipline has never been my strong suit. I did then complete the original commission but what follows is that accidental study. It covers territory I have charted before and there are bound to be a few echoes, but it is surprising how a familiar country can change over time. The book is offered as a series of reflections on American drama in the second half of the twentieth century. It does not aim to be comprehensive. What I hope it does is reflect my fascination with writers who in staging their plays have also staged the anxieties, the tensions and the myths of a nation en route from a world war to the end of a millennium.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Modern American Drama, 1945–2000 , pp. ixPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000