In a period of just over thirty years (1663-1694), John Dryden (August 9, 1631 – May 12, 1700) wrote or coauthored twenty-eight plays, an output that made him the most prolific dramatist of his day. His amplitude remains even more remarkable… Read More ›
William Congreve’s (24 January 1670 – 19 January 1729) first play, The Old Bachelor, was an instant success; its initial run of fourteen days made it the most popular play since Thomas Otway’s Venice Preserved (pr., pb. 1682). The Double-Dealer… Read More ›
During his first period of playwriting (1963-1972), Lanford Wilson (April 13, 1937 – March 24, 2011) struggled to learn his trade—mainly in the convivial atmosphere of Off-Off-Broadway, where it did not matter if sometimes audiences did not show up. His… Read More ›
Arthur Miller (October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005) has been acclaimed as one of the most distinguished American dramatists since Eugene O’Neill, the father of modern American drama. Because of his direct engagement with political issues and with the… Read More ›
William Wycherley’s (8 April 1641 – 1 January 1716) dramatic canon consists of only four plays, and his stature in English letters depends almost entirely on a single work, The Country Wife. In his own day, The Plain-Dealer was his… Read More ›
Michel Tremblay (born 25 June 1942) is part of a new generation of playwrights that emerged in Quebec during the 1960’s and 1970’s, a time of profound political and cultural change for this province. Led by Tremblay, these writers saw… Read More ›
Wendy Wasserstein (October 18, 1950 – January 30, 2006) has been hailed as the foremost theatrical chronicler of the lives of women of her generation. Her plays, steeped in her unique brand of humor, are moving, sometimes wrenching explorations of… Read More ›
To accuse Oscar Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) of anything so active-sounding as “achievement” would be an impertinence that the strenuously indolent author would most likely deplore. Yet it must be admitted that Wilde’s presence, poses, ideas,… Read More ›
Stephen Sondheim (born. March 22, 1930) was the most critically acclaimed figure in American musical theater during the last three decades of the twentieth century. Sondheim has won the Tony Award for Best Original Score five times, more than any… Read More ›
Tremendously influential in both Europe and the United States, August Strindberg (22 January 1849 – 14 May 1912) was begrudgingly praised by Henrik Ibsen as one who would be greater than he, and more generously lauded half a century later… Read More ›
Neil Simon (July 4, 1927 – August 26, 2018) has established himself as a leading American playwright of the late twentieth century. As a master of domestic comedy and one-line humor, his popular appeal was established early in his career…. Read More ›
Richard Brinsley Sheridan (30 October 1751 – 7 July 1816) was the best playwright of eighteenth century England, a time of great actors rather than great playwrights. Judged on theatrical rather than strictly literary merit, Sheridan also ranks with the… Read More ›
The first author ever to have had two plays (French Without Tears and While the Sun Shines) run for more than one thousand performances each on London’s West End, Terence Rattigan (10 June 1911 – 30 November 1977) was one… Read More ›
Ntozake Shange’s (October 18, 1948 – October 27, 2018) work embodies a rich confusion of genres and all the contradictions inherent in a world in which violence and oppression polarize life and art. These polarizations in Shange’s work both contribute… Read More ›
Few dramatists can lay claim to the universal reputation achieved by William Shakespeare. His plays have been translated into many languages and performed on amateur and professional stages throughout the world. Radio, television, and film versions of the plays in… Read More ›
Much of J. B. Priestley’s ((13 September 1894 – 14 August 1984)) drama explores the oneness of all human beings. That notion leads the dramatist to view individuals as members of a charmed or magic circle. The circle is continually… Read More ›
Christopher Durang (born January 2, 1949) belongs to the postmodernist wave of American playwrights who emerged during the 1970’s, including A. R. Gurney, Jr., Tina Howe, and Sam Shepard. These writers fused the experimental techniques of the structuralist theater experiments… Read More ›
As a playwright, composer, lyricist, producer, director, author, and actor, Noël Coward (16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973) spent his life entertaining the public. This he did with a flair, sophistication, and polish that are not readily found in… Read More ›
Early in his career, during and after World War I, Jean Cocteau (5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) wrote scenarios for ballets and adaptations of Greek myths. His plays of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s were highly original… Read More ›
Caryl Churchill (born 3 September 1938, London) has become well known for her willingness to experiment with dramatic structure. Her innovations in this regard are sometimes so startling and compelling that reviewers tend to focus on the novelty of her… Read More ›
It may be said that Frank Chin (born February 25, 1940) has pioneered in the field of Asian American literature. His daring and verbally exuberant theater has asserted the presence of the richly unique and deeply human complexities of Chinese… Read More ›
With labels flourishing during the new era in drama (Osborne’s angry theater, Beckett’s Theater of the Absurd, Pinter’s comedy of menace, Arnold Wesker’s kitchen-sink drama), Alan Ayckbourn (born 12 April 1939), too, has been honored with his own label, the… Read More ›
Despite the fifth century b.c.e. Athenian political and religious issues that are diffused more often in Aeschylus’s tragedies than in those of Sophocles and Euripides and that demand some historical explanation for the modern reader, the plays of Aeschylus (c…. Read More ›
Anton Chekhov (29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904 was talking about other writers when he said, “The best of them are realists and depict life as it is, but because every line they write is permeated, as with a juice, by… Read More ›
Karel Capek (9 January 1890 – 25 December 1938) was concerned with the natural order of things, a theme that pervaded much of his work. His allegorical approach to expressionism linked his deep philosophical concerns to striking and often disturbing human… Read More ›
The dramatic works of Samuel Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) reflect the evolution of his interests in various means of artistic expression, as he composed plays for stage, radio, cinema, and television. In his stage plays, he… Read More ›
If the weight of critical opinion places Tennessee Williams (March 26, 1911 – February 25, 1983), below Eugene O’Neill as America’s premiere dramatist, there should be no question that the former playwright is without peer in either the diversity of… Read More ›
Working with forms ranging from the morality play to avant-garde expressionism, Amiri Baraka (October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014) throughout his career sought to create dramatic rituals expressing the intensity of the physical and psychological violence that dominates his… Read More ›
Sam Shepard (November 5, 1943 – July 27, 2017) was one of the United States’ most prolific, most celebrated, and most honored playwrights. Writing exclusively for the Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway theater, Shepard has nevertheless won eleven Obie Awards (for Red… Read More ›
The young Jean Anouilh (23 June 1910 – 3 October 1987) arrived in Paris during one of the richest periods of French dramatic activity since the seventeenth century. Recently rescued from the commercial doldrums by a “Cartel” of four brilliant… Read More ›
When, in 1893, John Millington Synge (16 April 1871 – 24 March 1909) was choosing between musical and literary careers, two seminal documents were published that would profoundly affect his decision and form the character of his subsequent work. These… Read More ›
John Osborne’s (12 December 1929 – 24 December 1994) most generous critics credit him with having transformed the English stage on a single night: May 8, 1956, when Look Back in Anger opened at the Royal Court Theatre. He is… Read More ›
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) came to an English theater settled into the well-made play, a theater that had not known a first-rate dramatist for more than a century. The pap on which its audiences… Read More ›
Tom Stoppard’s (born. 3 July 1937) dramaturgy reveals a cyclical pattern of activity. He tends to explore certain subjects or techniques in several minor works, then creates a major play that integrates the fruits of his earlier trial runs. Thus… Read More ›
In Each in His Own Way, Luigi Pirandello (28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) playfully has one of his characters ask another to justify his incessant “harping on this illusion and reality string.” So persistent is Pirandello’s dramatic examination… Read More ›
Harold Pinter (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) is sometimes associated with the generation of British playwrights who emerged in the 1950’s and are known as the Angry Young Men. His first plays, with their dingy, working-class settings and surface… Read More ›
Although Eugène Ionesco’s (26 November 1909 – 28 March 1994) dramatic art is often traced to such precursors as the plays of Alfred Jarry and Antonin Artaud, it is essentially sui generis, springing primarily from nightmarish visions deeply rooted in… Read More ›
Bertolt Brecht’s (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956) early dramas are anarchic, nihilistic, and antibourgeois. In them, he glorifies antisocial outsiders such as adventurers, pirates, and prostitutes; the tone of these works is often cynical. In the years after… Read More ›
Though he is touted sometimes as the chief American practitioner of the absurd in drama, Edward Albee (March 12, 1928 – September 16, 2016) only rarely combines in a single work both the techniques and the philosophy associated with that… Read More ›
Between 1922 and 1943 Italy was ruled by a fascist dictatorship which used mainstream cinema as a means of disseminating officially sanctioned conceptions of national identity. A national regulatory body, the Direzione Generale della Cinematografica, was established in 1934 in… Read More ›
The word ‘tragedy’ in common usage today means little more than a sad or unnecessarily unpleasant event: a motorway crash in which several people died is described as a ‘tragedy’ in the newspapers; a promising career cut short by cheating… Read More ›
Performance Studies is a new academic discipline, developed largely out of university departments of drama or of theatre studies, and driven mostly in USA, especially by Richard Schechner (b. 1934). Schechner was something of a polymath: theatre director with his… Read More ›
The Trickster impulse, which is a symbol of transgression in world literature, is variously defined by anthropologists, sociologists, psychotherapists, cultural theorists, writers and film critics. Enemy of boundaries, trickster figure resists the narrow framing of definition. Creativity- the ability to… Read More ›