Box Seat is perhaps the most provocatively ambiguous short story included in the African-American writer Jean Toomer’s Cane, a collection of poems, sketches, and dramatic vignettes. It includes such strange lyricisms as “shy girls whose eyes shine reticently upon—the gleaming… Read More ›
It is difficult to find appropriate words to define Margaret Atwood’s (born November 18, 1939) significance in Canadian culture and literature. Atwood is a prolific writer who not only blazes a trail for contemporary Canadian writers but also helps Canadian… Read More ›
The Artificial Nigger focuses on several themes that recur in Flannery O’Connor‘s (March 25, 1925 – August 3, 1964) fiction. It features tension between generations (an adult, Mr. Head, who is determined to prove his intellectual ability over a child);… Read More ›
By the time Anne Tyler published The Artificial Family, her 20th story, in the summer of 1975, she was already an established writer who had published her fifth novel. Soon after Toby Scott and Mary Glover meet at a party in… Read More ›
Bernard Malamud (April 26, 1914 – March 18, 1986) was 26 when he wrote Armistice in mid-1940. The story had remained unpublished for nearly 50 years until released posthumously in 1989 as the first of his 16 theretofore uncollected stories… Read More ›
In her short story April Showers, (1900) Edith Wharton tells the story of Theodora (writing under the pseudonym of Gladys Glyn), an aspiring young writer who has just completed her first novel, April Showers. Through the fictional Kathleen Kyd, Wharton… Read More ›
“Manischevitz, a tailor, in his fifty-first year suffered many reverses and indignities. Previously a man of comfortable means, he overnight lost all he had” (43). So begins Bernard Malamud’s Angel Levine, the fourth story in The Magic Barrel (1958), his… Read More ›
Despite the debt the African-American short story owes to the “national art form,” as Frank O’Connor called the American short story, it, like the other genres of the African-American literary tradition, must be traced back to the site that in… Read More ›
Describing the philosophical school of existentialism, French novelist and playwright Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942) wrote, “[I]n a universe suddenly divested of illusions and of light, man feels an alien, a stranger. . . . This divorce… Read More ›
For almost 40 years, the Theatre Guild, which proclaimed the desire to advance theater as an art, as opposed to pursuing commercial reward at the box office, was among the most influential producing organizations in America. The Guild arose in… Read More ›
The Provincetown Players was one of the most influential of the small, subscription theater groups that sprang up across America during the first two decades of the 20th century (see Little Theater Movement). Founded in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and later transplanted… Read More ›
Off-Off-Broadway is the experimental edge of New York theater. If Broadway is about commercial runs, and Off-Broadway today is about new voices and revivals, then Off-OffBroadway is about theater as performance, an affective experience. Jerry Talmer, writing for the Village… Read More ›
Off-Broadway developed as an alternative to Broadway, one that would free the creative possibilities of the stage from commercialism. It came into its own in the 1960s and 1970s, with important productions and serious attention from drama critics and the… Read More ›
Founded in 1947 by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, the Living Theatre started inauspiciously in the Becks’ living room, seating not more than 20 spectators. In these early years, the company produced experimental work by Paul Goodman, Gertrude Stein, Bertolt… Read More ›
The rise of the “little theater” movement was a reaction to the traditional practices of the American stage prior to 1910. Although the smallest towns had theater buildings and vaudeville houses in which well-worn plays and players kept up a… Read More ›
The history of Hispanic drama in what is now the United States begins in 1598 in present-day New Mexico with a theatrical recreation of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico staged by Juan Oñate and his followers entitled Los Moros y los… Read More ›
Founded in 1931 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg, the Group Theatre was an ensemble theater formed as a response to the old-fashioned theater of light entertainment that prevailed in the late 1920s. During its 10-year existence, the… Read More ›
The definition of what exactly constitutes “gay and lesbian theater” determines where one begins an examination of its place in American drama. Gay and lesbian drama is generally regarded as a contemporary phenomenon, denoting those plays specifically written or performed… Read More ›
The history of African-American theater and performance has been tied to the social and cultural circumstances of African-American existence. Because of the particular historical conditions of African-American life, the representation of African Americans on stage has contained profound political, social,… Read More ›
Dante’s Hell is a diorama of sin, enacted as both moral exhortation and poetic prophecy. Change is no longer possible here, and damnation is the irrevocable, total removal from God—a separation that is more terrible for being freely willed by… Read More ›
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