ally in New York in 1787.Dunlap (1766-1839) helped to turn the century on a native note with his historical melodrama Andre (1798). Robert Montgomery Bird (1806-1854) tailored his historical tragedy The Gladiator (1831) and his domestic tragedy The Broker of Bogota (1834). But the receipts went to the actors, not to the playwrights. Bird, discouraged, turned to writing novels like Nick of the Woods (1837). Was great theatrical activity in nineteenth-century America, a time when there were no movies, radio, or television. Every town of any size had its theater or opera house in which touring companies performed. Given the hunger for entertainment, one may wonder why no significant American drama was written in the century that produced, among others, Melville, Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson, and Twain.World War I, expressionism made itself felt, to be followed after World War II by the influence of Sartre, Brecht, and Samuel Beckett.the development of a native drama, the important impacts on modern American drama came from abroad. European drama, which was to influence modern American drama profoundly, matured in the last third of the nineteenth century with the achievements of three playwrights: the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), the Swede August Strindberg (1849-1912), and the Russian Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). Ibsen deliberately tackled subjects such as guilt, sexuality, and mental illness - subjects which had never before been so realistically and disturbingly portrayed on stage. Strindberg brought to his characterizations an unprecedented level of psychological complexity. And Chekhov, along with Ibsen and Strindberg, shifted the subject matter of drama from wildly theatrical displays of external action to inner action and emotions and the concerns of everyday life. Chekhov once remarked, People don t go to the North Pole and fall off icebergs. They go to the office and quarrel with their wives and eat cabbage soup. three great playwrights bequeathed to their American heirs plays about life as it is actually lived. They presented characters and situations more or less realistically, in what has been called the slice of life dramatic technique.drama is based on the illusion that when we watch a play, we are looking at life through a fourth wall that has been removed so that we can see the action. Soon after the beginning of the twentieth century, realism became the dominant mode of American drama. As with all theatrical revolutions, the movement toward realism began apart from the commercial theatre. But soon the commercial theatre adopted realism too.vitalization of both the American theater and American drama came not from the Broadway stage but from the little theaters later spreading to smaller cities and college campuses. Croups like the Washington Square Players in New York City and the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod (later in New York) were celebrated trailblazers.Eugene O Neill (1888-1953), American literature had its first great dramatist. O Neill s beginnings were off-Broadway efforts, but they came as a consequence of his familiarity with the working theater (his father had been a famous actor) and his study in the 47 Workshop at Harvard under George Pierce Baker.period between the two world wars saw an activity in American drama that made O Neill part of a movement. The Adding Machine (1923) by Elmer Rice did much to bring the expressionist movement to the American stage. His Street Scene (1929) and Judgment Day (1934) were more topical but not less socially conscious. What Price Glory? (1924) by Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959) was a successful war play whose lusty language startled audiences. Sidney Howard (1891-1939), who like O Neill, was a student at Harvard s 47 Workshop , began a series of popular plays with They Knew What They Wanted (1924), which broadened the limits of dramatic subject matter by the realism of its story of unorthodox love. Philip Barry (1896-1949), still another 47 Workshop student, began as a writer of urbane comedies (Paris Bound, 1927 ) but gained greater dramatic strength through more serious plays - Hotel Universe (1930), The Animal Kingdom (1932), and Here Comes the Clowns (1938). The finest proletarian plays of the socially conscious...
