Luigi Pirandello is not often linked to George Bernard Shaw, although they did communicate through notes on one occasion, with Shaw expressing himself in a mélange of operatic French, German, and Italian, the last of which gave Pirandello much entertainment. Both playwrights admired and liked one another; Shaw praised Six Characters as the most original play he had encountered, while Pirandello greatly admired Saint Joan and wanted Marta Abba to perform the part. The New York Times invited Pirandello to write an essay on Shaw’s play, which Pirandello concluded with the assertion that Saint Joan was “a work of poetry from beginning to end.” Further consideration of how Shaw’s plays related to Pirandello’s reveals that, in spite of Pirandello’s despairing view of the human condition, which Pirandello constantly mocked as futile, one can discover moments of humor that often resemble Shaw’s comedic style.

The response to the Great War in both the commercial and the non-profit theater in the United States was substantial, with different trends emerging during the periods of U. S. neutrality, intervention, and postwar reflection. Although the Espionage Act squelched all but the most propagandistic pro-war plays and reviews, opposition to the war and the country’s entry into it was feely dramatized alongside pro-war plays before its passage. The country’s most celebrated playwright, Eugene O’Neill, explored the effects of war trauma during the war and its aftermath in The Sniper (1917), Shell Shock (1918), Strange Interlude (1928), and Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). In the decade after the war, Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings’s What Price Glory (1924) and its film adaptations, established a consciously realistic perspective on the war from the soldier’s point of view in America’s cultural consciousness. After the Armistice, pacifist views also found effective expression in the fantasy and historical analogy of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Aria da Capo (1919) and Robert Sherwood’s The Road to Rome (1927).