One of Williams’s more famous works and his personal favorite, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1955. This three-act play is set in the Pollitts’ stately home, a Southern plantation in the fertile… Read More ›
Drama Criticism
Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire
Tennessee Williams‘s (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983) A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), is generally regarded as his best. Initial reaction was mixed, but there would be little argument now that it is one of the most powerful plays… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie
Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944) was regarded when first produced as highly unusual; one of the play’s four characters serves as commentator as well as participant; the play itself represents the memories of the commentator years later, and hence,… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape
Audiences confront much that is disturbing in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, beginning with the title itself—and as the play moves forward, we are hard-pressed to find any evidence of the “comedy” O’Neill promises in its subtitle. When it was… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms
Eugene O’Neill’s greatest play up to this point in his career and the finest American tragedy to be written until then, Desire Under the Elms premiered on November 11, 1924, at the Greenwich Village Theatre in New York City. O’Neill… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!
On July 1, 1932, Eugene O’Neill visited his boyhood home, Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut. It looked smaller than he remembered and poorly maintained. He wished he had never gone. Two months later, however, on the morning of… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra
Eugene O’Neill began writing Mourning Becomes Electra, one of his most revered dramas, in France at Chateau du Plessis near Tours in the Loire Valley. Recovering from the debacle of Dynamo, which O’Neill believed failed critically because he released it… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh
Eugene O’Neill’s reputation as the United States’ “master of the misbegotten” culminates in his late masterpiece The Iceman Cometh. The action takes place in a downtown Manhattan saloon and “Raines-Law” hotel called Harry Hope’s and covers two days in the… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night
Eugene O’Neill’s full-length masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night is widely considered the finest play in American theater history. Perhaps the most startling facet of O’Neill’s greatest achievement is the ghostly presence of its author, a revelation to audience members… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones
The Emperor Jones is the first international triumph of expressionism by an American playwright; with it, Eugene O’Neill single-handedly introduced experimental American theater to Europe and established his reputation as the United States’ pre-eminent playwright. The November 1, 1920, premiere… Read More ›
Analysis of Tang Xianzu’s The Peony Pavilion
Has the world ever seen a woman’s love to rival that of Du Liniang? Dreaming of a lover she fell sick; once sick she became ever worse; and finally, after painting her own portrait as a legacy to the world,… Read More ›
Analysis of Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid
Le Cid is a powerful work, but it lacks what the clumsiest sixteenth-century tragedy had: a concentration on a single tragic meaning. We have instead, a play which (for the firsttime in French drama) successfully attains seriousness by means of… Read More ›
Analysis of Aphra Behn’s The Rover
With Mrs. Behn we turn a very important corner on the road. We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come… Read More ›
Analysis of Gerhart Hauptmann’s The Weavers
Seen in the context of Hauptmann’s work and of the contemporary literary situation, Die Weber was indeed a unique contribution. For its author it represented a first application of Naturalist theory and technique to documented, historical subject matter, and for… Read More ›
Analysis of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit
Tragedy presupposes guilt, despair, moderation, lucidity, vision, a sense of responsibility. In the Punch-and-Judy show of our century . . . there are no more guilty and also, no responsible men. It is always, “We couldn’t help it” and “We… Read More ›
Analysis of S. Ansky’s The Dybbuk
The particular setting of The Dybbuk is the world of Hasidic pietism which grew out of one sage’s intense sense of the goodness and accessibility of God and out of his profound conviction, therefore, of the necessity for joy and… Read More ›
Analysis of Lope de Vega’s The Best Mayor, The King
Lope is like ten brilliant minds inhabiting one body. An attempt to enclose him in any formula is like trying to make one pair of boots to fit a centipede. —Ezra Pound, The Spirit of Romance Any gathering of the… Read More ›
Analysis of Gao Xingjian’s The Other Shore
Gao Xingjian’s plays are characterized by originality, in no way diminished by the fact that he has been influenced both by modern Western and traditional Chinese currents. His greatness as a dramatist lies in the manner in which he has… Read More ›
Analysis of Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing!
The Berger family are on the verge of the middle class and as such are especially vulnerable. To deny the reality of the American dream is ostensibly to condemn themselves to permanent deprivation. The constant image is one of flight,… Read More ›
Analysis of Jean Genet’s The Balcony
His plays are concerned with expressing his own feeling of helplessness and solitude when confronted with the despair and loneliness of man caught in the hall of mirrors of the human condition, inexorably trapped by an endless progression of images… Read More ›
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