In the 1930’s and 1940’s American theater came into its own. The variety, quality and social relevance of the plays made it truly the Golden Age of American Theater. The plays selected for this SDG deal with the social and political issues that engaged the country, including the Great Depression, economic inequality, Freudian theories, World War II and American economic success after the War. The best of them combine serious treatment of those issues with skillful and entertaining drama. The playwrights include Odets, Kingsley, Miller, Williams, van Druten, Wilder, Hellman, O’Neill, Barry and McCullers.
Discussions will include each play’s structure, language and characters, as well as its societal setting and message. There will also be a focus on the lives and careers of the playwrights and two organizations that sponsored important plays in the 1930’s, the Group Theater and the Federal Theater Project. Each Presenter will be encouraged to select key passages of the plays for that week for SDG members to read aloud "in character."
1.
Robert Sherwood, Idiot’s Delight
2.
Maxwell Anderson, Winterset
3.
Sidney Kingsley, Dead End
4.
Philip Barry, Philadelphia Story
5.
Clifford Odets, Golden Boy, Waiting for Lefty (short play)
6.
George Kaufman & Moss Hart, You Can’t Take It with You
7.
Thornton Wilder, The Skin of Our Teeth
8.
Eugene O’Neill, Mourning Becomes Electra, The Hairy Ape (short play)
9.
John van Druten, I Am a Camera
10. Lillian Hellman, The Little
Foxes
11. Arthur Miller, Death of A
Salesman
12. Tennessee Williams, The Glass
Menagerie, 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (short play)
13. Richard Rogers & Oscar Hammerstein,
Carousel
14. William Saroyan, The Time of
Your Life, Hello Out There (short play)
Core Anthologies:
John Gassner, 20 Best
Plays of the American Theatre
Burns, Mantle, The
Best Plays of 1938-39
Harlan Harcher, Modern
American Drama
General
John Gassner, The
Theatre in Our Times
Arthur Hornblow, A
History of the Theatre in America: From Its Beginnings to the
Present
Time
Gerald Boardman,
American Theatre: A Chronicle of Comedy and Drama
1930-69
Wikipedia, Theater in
the United States