-Female voices began to be heard

-Questions traditional gender roles and the place of women in American society

-More than 100 companies in the US

-Omaha Magic (NE)

-The Spiderwoman Collective (NY)

-Split Britches

-Avant-garde dramatists

-Born in Havana

-Plays:

-Unconventional is structure, dialogue and staging

-Fundamentally symbolic

-Often include brutality and slapstick

-Her work embodies the ethic of Off-Off Broadway and strikes a unique balance between concern for human relationships and social/political consciousness

-Often directs her own work, no desire to move Off-Off Broadway

The story of Fran, a young dancer sharing a New York apartment with two men and reciving regular missives, somehow yearning in their mundane concerns, from her brother Luis in Cuba. The play conveys, with a gentle humor how lives can be led together spiritually yet seperate in spatial disconnect

-How I Learned to Drive won Pulitzer

-Professor at Brown

-Tends to theatricalize sensitive, difficult and controversial subjects such as sexual abuse and prostitution

Major Characters of 

How I Learned to Drive

-Lil' Bit

-Uncle Peck

-Aunt Mary

-Mother "Titless wonder"

-Big Papa

-Grandmother

-Cousin Bobby (BB)

Themes of 

How I Learned to Drive

-Growing Up

-Pedophila

-Vulnerability

-Gender Roles

Susan-Lori Parks

Topdog/Underdog

Tells the story of two brothers: Lincoln and Booth, down and art, specialize in sidewalk scam, about poses and pretenses, large and small, that somehow take you closer to the truth

-Africaness manifested in experience and identity

-Ritual-in the play and play as ritual

-Music-blues

-Poetic, rich languae

-Motifs:Memory, history, ritual, spirituality and identity

-Gender: Male/eccentric/gynophobic

Female: reflect defiant, counter-patriarchal

A.A. Identity- A.A. cosmology vs. Western Christianity

-Does not reject Christianity

-Rejects imagery and tenets that promotes whiteness

-Uses both in his plays, finding the similarities but ending in conflict

Fences

August Wilson

-Set in the 50s, 6th in 10 part Pittsburg Cycle

-Explore the evolving black experience and examines race relations

-Argues blacks should search for their own unique identity rooted in their past rather than in white America

-Won Pulitzer

-Middle-Aged black man who is struggling to raise a son, keep a family and deal with changes in social standards

-A Brechtian musical about racial violence in LA in 1943

-Episodic, uses narrator, titles, music comments on the action, uses history to draw parallels to contemporary issues

-Won an Obie

-El Teatro Campesino

-Advocated for better life for immigrant farm worker

-First Chicano play on Broadway

-Based on a true story of Mexican Americans wrongfully imprisoned for murder

-The son of Chinese immigrant, much of his work deals with the roles of Chinese Americans in contemporary society

-Co-wrote Aida and revisions of Flower Drum

-Yellow Face is an autobiographical reaction to a white actor playing Asian role in Miss Saigon

-Won the Tony

-Primary characters: Rene Gallimard and Song Liling

-Based on true story

-uses references to the opera Madame Butterfly to underscore themes related to imperialism and sexism

-Race: West vs. East 

West is strong/masculine, East is weak/feminine

-Gender: The perfect woman is an illusion that can only be created by a man. What makes one male or female? 

-Power: Power over. Who has it? Rene or Song? East or West? Man or woman?

-Strictly speaking there was no N.A. theatre tradition; rather ancient rituals and communal celebrations

-Audience considered participants

-Most ceremonies outlawed by US Gov

-American Religious Freedom Act of 1972 changed all that

-The Rememberer by Stephen Dietz dramatizes this period in history

-Native American and Feminist

-Founded 1975

-Oldest Native American and women's theatre

-Draws on storytelling and other theatrical traditions to celebrate identity as American Indian women and to comment on stereotypes of women in general

-Emphasis today is not on tradition or history but on contemporary issues

-Boys in the Band (Matt Crowley) 1968

-First brought gay life to the forefront.

-About a group of men living an openly gay life

-Thought to be stereotypical after awhile by the gay community. Has recently been reevaluated for its historical significance

-Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes

-Won the Pulitzer and 2 Tonys

-Like Ibsen his plays provoke social discussion as opposed to being simply issue plays

-On one level the play is an indictment of the government led by Reagan, from blatant disregard for the AIDS crisis to the flagrant political corruption

-But beneath lies a meditation on what it means to live and die of AIDS in a society that cares less about human life and basic decency

-One of the most inventive and prolific American playwrights

-More than 42 plays

-his characters are storytellers

-His plays are characterized by long monologues

-We're never quite sure how much of what they're saying is true

-Explores the death of the traditional family structure, inability to establish lasting relationships, the violence of the American society and longing for simpler times

-Sam Shepard

-Tale of two brothers. Austin, a "successful" young man with a family and a budding screenwriting career and Lee an unshaven alcholic, thief, and loser who has also decided to return home to steal a few things

-Reminiscent of Pinter

-Naturalistic language and settings

-Down and out characters with clearly recognizable struggles but he does not provide clear cut exposition of dramatic resolutions associated with traditional realism

-His plays question the ability of humans to communicate and interact honestly

Plays:

-Oleanna, Glengarry Glen Ross, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo

-Won the Pulitzer for Drama 

-Play shows parts of two days in the lives of 4 desperate Chicago real estate agents who are prepared to engage in any number of unethical, illegal act, to sell undesirable real estate to unwilling prospective buyers

-Title comes from the names of two of the real estate developements being peddled by the salesmen characters

-Commercial theatre is still prominent and the musical is its strongest weapon

-Significant Changes

The concept musical- built around an idea rather than a story

-Assassins, Sunday in the Park, Into the Woods

Bob Fosse-Pippin

Michael Bennett- A Chorus Line

Tommy Tune- Will Rogers Follies

Susan Stroman- The Producers

Jerome Robbins- West Side

Andrew Lloyd Webber

Jesus Christ Superstar

Evita

Cats

Phantom

Sunset Blvd

The Producers

Hairspray

Spamalot

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

-Regarded as the most important figure in the American musical scene in the last four decades

-Won pulitzer for Sunday in the Park

-Combines complicated lyrics, ingenious characters, intriguing subject matter, and complex music and lyrics

Assassins, Sunday in the Park, into the woods, sweeny todd

n  Result of theatre artists looking for ways to break away from mainstream commercial theatre. Also an international trend

Tend to reflect POSTMODERNIST CONVENTIONS

-Question categorization of works

-Blend high and popular arts

-Blue the lines between the arts

-Question the idea of an accepted "canon" of classics

-Rebel against traditional readings fof text

-Famous for deconstructing text 

-The Wooster Group's theatre pieces are constructed as assemblages of juxtaposed elements: radical staging of both modern and classic texts, found materials, films and videos

-Founded by Richard Schechner as The Performance Group Famous for deconstructing well known texts

-Miller sued them to keep them from deconstructing The Crucible 

-an artist-driven experimental theatre collective generating original works and re-imagined adaptations of classic plays through multi-disciplinary, technologically inventive collaborations among its members and a wide world of contemporary composers, writers, musicians, puppetters and V.A.

-High visual style, developed many pieces using imagery

Doll House

Mabou Mines

-Nora comes home with a dollhouse so large that children can play inside

-Men are same size as children

-Isben's feminism is metaphorically rendered as a parable of scale.

-Saratoga International Theatre Institute

-Partners with Tadashi Suzuki

-Emphasis on creating new work through

-View points

-a technique for discovering character and blocking organically. Inspired by dance, the viewpoints are a set of names given to certain principles of movement through time and space

-AD Trinity Rep 89-90

-Professor at Columbia

-Best Director Obies

-Co-founded SITI

-Wrote "A Director Prepares" and "Viewpoints"

-Many have become the equivalent of off-off Broadway houses, developing show and then transferring them to Broadway

-Steppenwolf (Chicago)

-Lookingglass Theatre (Chicago)

-La Jolla (San Diego)

-Actors Theatre of Louisville

-Originally inspired and informed by:

-Dada, surrealism, and happening, which stressed the irrational and attacked traditional artistic value and forms

-The theories of Artaud (theatre of cruelty) and Grotowski (poor theatre)

-In earlier forms story, character and text were minimized. Emphasis was on the visual and ritualistic aspects of performing

-Often the work of an individual artist incorporating highly personal messages and social/political messages

-Overall effect much like a continually transforming collage

-Martha Clarke (1984)

-Performance theatre

-Based on Hieronymous Bosch's famous painting by the same name

-Explores heaven and hell and the beauty and sins in-between