Greatest American Playwrights

Theatre in America has acted as a crucible, a melting pot, a mirror, and a voice for American attitudes for a long time, breaking down race and gender barriers years ahead of the nation at large and paving the way for changes in how we think, as a country and as a culture.

Playwrights have been important writers in our country- arguably the most important writers - in the development of the contemporary American mindset, characterized by passionate egalitarianism (at times), by troubled self-reflection and by a fundamental craving toward the possession of truth.

Theatre, since the dawn of the modern era, has been about defusing illusion and tearing the veil of lies and misconceptions. It has served to question the "American dream" so as to see it clearly and to better believe that it may still stand before us as something worth striving for - or, so that we might see America's act of dreaming as theatre in itself, a comforting national myth.

The major playwrights in the American tradition have been black and white, male and female. In a way, these writers embody the American dream they analyzed. They are the diverse and intelligent, forward-thinking people that we think of when we imagine the ideal America. They are potent. They are honest. They speak with voices that have been tested by poverty, by prejudice, by anguish, and have proven themselves enduring.

A tradition to be celebrated, the playwrights of America have been hailed internationally and domestically with awards and accolades and ticket sales too.

Tennessee Williams (1914-1983) was awarded the two Pulitzer Prizes for his penetrating, psychologically driven dramas: Morning Becomes Electra, Long Days' Journey into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. With a Freudian bent, Tennessee Williams worked to assault the nagging anxieties of a country still getting to know itself. His plays often focus on the conflict between past and present and the need to change with age and with changing times.

Arthur Miller (1915-2005), perhaps America's best known playwright, took up Williams' torch and ran with it. He was a national figure in his day, marrying Marilyn Monroe, and captivating an era with a full-on challenge to the delusional qualities of nostalgia, blind religious dogmatic belief, and man's own desire to be good.

In Death of a Salesman and After the Fall, Miller explores questions about what happens when weak people are confronted with situations that challenge the views they hold of themselves.*

Though the characters loathe their weaknesses, they succumb to them without fail, sinking down into self-defeat and dragging others after them. His plays help us to see that we are only as strong as our weakest moment and through this lens we discover the costs of moral failure.

Nowhere in Arthur Miller's work is this theme clearer than in The Crucible, where a whole town succumbs to the pressures of a literally incredible witch hunt resulting in shameful public and private disaster.

Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller wrote to expose the American soul, each in his own way. The playwrights to follow them continued in this drive toward unearthing and articulating difficult truths.

Lorraine Hansberry's (1930-1965) A Raisin in the Sun is an emotional, political, and intellectual exploration of a family's experience with racial prejudice in Chicago. This single play - a great success - secured Hansberry's reputation as a substantial American playwright.

Her play is upsetting and uplifting in its honest examination of the social pressures of economics and race in America in the 1950's - pressures affect us today just as they did sixty years ago.

August Wilson (1945-2005) is perhaps America's most recent "great playwright". With his "Fences" series, August Wilson presented a meaningful understanding of life in America. His work was more than an expression of angst, more than an effort to draw attention to anyone's plight of heart or mind. It was a compassionate articulation of the complexities of identity and ambition that both plague and undergird our country.

To say that August Wilson is the most recent great playwright in America is no slight to the writers living today producing provocative, insightful, and entertaining work. David Mamet is an extremely successful playwright. He is great. Perhaps he, along with Sam Shepherd, belongs in the pantheon of great American playwrights.

Time will tell in the end.

*Arthur Miller wrote about weakness, most of all. Death of a Salesman takes on the subject of weakness with the example of a man faced with failure and too weak spirited, too weak minded to overcome the idea that he has failed. Though his wife provides him all the fuel he should need to see his life as a success - having raised two children and lived decently - he cannot accept her comfort. Because he cheated on her and because the strength of forgiveness is not in him, Willy cannot find his way out of the very human, very American weakness that swallows him up.

Sources:
PBS.org
Rutgers.edu
http://www.augustwilson.net/

http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc48.html