The giant with whom one has to start any list of enduring dramatists who have created a substantial body of work is Samuel Beckett. If not quite the god of 20th Century drama, he is at least its principal prophet, his ”Waiting for Godot,” ”Endgame” and ”Happy Days” being the definitive post-World War II statements of man`s alienation and diminution in a barren, dangerous world. Most contemporary European and American playwrights, major and minor, are working in his shadow.
Harold Pinter in England began his career, like Beckett, with commercial failure, but his ”The Birthday Party,” ”The Caretaker” and such later works as ”Old Times” and ”A Kind of Alaska” have become forceful dramas on the mysteries and menace of time and of man`s uncertain existence. Pinter`s dialogue has had a profound effect on drama, not only for its famous pauses, but for its ability to raise mundane talk into disturbing, haunting poetry.
In the United States, the playwright whose sensibilities and poetry have most powerfully reflected this shadowland of drama is David Mamet. His major works–”American Buffalo,” ”Glengarry Glen Ross” and ”Edmond”–all peopled with characters and language scraped from the underbelly of U.S. society, are works of vivid images and intensely concentrated language, and all embrace Mamet`s constant concern with the need for enduring, loving human relationships amid the carelessness, stress and greed of a grasping urban wasteland.
Though he is now recognized chiefly (and illogically) for only one play,
”The House of Blue Leaves,” John Guare has produced such an imaginative body of work that the fanciful beauties and emotional powers of his neglected ”Landscape of the Body,” ”Bosoms and Neglect” and the ”Lydie Breeze”
trilogy are bound to be recognized in years to come. Guare works outside the stream of contemporary realism that dominates so much American drama, but the organic structure of his ambitious dramas is clear and precise, and their flights of fancy soar with eloquence.
Athol Fugard`s work, overpraised for the best of intentions in its time, is likely to decrease in esteem as time goes by. His plays are on a small scale, frequently overwritten and slow to develop. But the passionate humanitarianism of ”Master Harold . . . and the Boys” and ”The Blood Knot” cannot be ignored and will be preserved.
The plays of Arthur Miller, now in a renaissance of performance, are, at worst, heavy-handed in their liberal philosophical bent (”All My Sons” and
”The Crucible”), but the gray lion of American drama has created an authentic American masterpiece, ”Death of a Salesman,” that already has survived one crucial test of a classic: It has withstood and even prospered in strikingly different interpretations.
The souring of Edward Albee in recent years is a sad spectacle, a bitter writer snarling tiredly at the snipers of criticism. When all that is said and done, Albee will live on through the ferocious personal drama of ”Who`s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, the intensity of his early one-acts (”The Zoo Story” and ”The American Dream”) and, one hopes, the over-reaching but nonetheless powerful mysticism of ”Tiny Alice.” Albee`s time as a playwright may be gone, but the important plays he produced during his time remain and are going to last.
Much the same can be said of John Osborne, the quintessential angry young man of English theater in the late 1950s whose latterday growlings have been reserved chiefly for attacks against his critics. Still, that can`t take away the landmark accomplishment of his ”Look Back in Anger” (1956) and its vigorous theatrical follow-up, ”The Entertainer” (1957). They helped define theater of the postwar era and set the course for a new realism in English drama.
Eugene Ionesco is another name without which modern drama would not exist. His ”absurdist” vision of individualism struggling to survive in a chaotic universe of mass ignorance found specific, vivid life in everything from short works (”The Bald Soprano”) to full-length dramas
(”Rhinoceros”). Spreading from the continent of post-war Europe to England and then to the United States, his plays have had a profound influence on Western drama of the last 40 years.
Tom Stoppard, a native of Czechoslovakia who has become a dazzling artist of the English language, fills his plays with brilliant wordplay, but his underlying classicism is found in the constant theme of his work, the interplay of illusion and reality, whether it be in antic history
(”Travesties”) or contemporary romance (”The Real Thing”). The characters in Stoppard`s dramas are tied to a literary and theatrical tradition that plunges them into a world far beyond their immediate personal horizons, from the petty drama critics of ”The Real Inspector Hound” to the bewildered title heroes of ”Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.”
There have been many key collaborators in the musicals of Stephen Sondheim–director Harold Prince, librettists Hugh Wheeler and James Lapine
–but the overriding artistic sensibilities of such complex classics as
”Sweeney Todd,” ”Sunday in the Park with George” and ”Follies” have been those of Sondheim, expressed in the inventive lyrics and urgent musical voice of his scores.” He`s a gifted songwriter and a richly endowed artist of the theater.
Andrew Lloyd Webber, not yet in Sondheim`s class, nonetheless will be remembered for his music in ”Evita,” ”Cats” and, his richest work to date, ”Phantom of the Opera.”
Years after many an earnest drama has faded from view, the Broadway comedies of Neil Simon will still hold the stage because of their important underpinnings of familial relationships. From the early ”Come Blow Your Horn” to his most mature work yet, ”Broadway Bound,” and especially in the certified classic of ”The Odd Couple,” Simon has been concerned with the problems of family survival and unity. He has done this in a comic mode, but the concern is both serious and significant.
From London, Alan Ayckbourn`s comedies are notable for their structural ingenuity and their deepening, darkening criticism of the manners and mores of the English middle class. The mental breakdowns, petty cruelties and arrogant hostilities of male-female relationships are illustrated in comedies in which the explosive laughter is stopped by a sudden realization of the misery beneath the ridiculousness.
A prolific playwright whose best work may still lie ahead of him, Lanford Wilson has produced at least one authentic masterwork of America in the 1960s, ”The Fifth of July.” This funny, heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful study of a battered post-Vietnam generation of emotionally and physically crippled survivors is deeply moving and enriching.
From that traumatic time of the `60s also comes much of the work of David Rabe, his dramas of the Vietnam era reaching their most furious, compassionate peak in ”Streamers.” ”Hurlyburly,” a descent into the fringes of hell through the experiences of a group of minor Hollywood outcasts, is a scorching assessment of the U.S. in spiritual decline.
This list of classics-for-the-future leaves uncounted such playwrights as Howard Sackler (”The Great White Hope”) and D. L. Coburn (”The Gin Game”) whose single hits will surely be revived. Sadly, it also fails to mention the contributions of such respected artists as Simon Gray, Edward Bond, Peter Nichols, Alan Bennett, Arnold Wesker, Brian Friel and Michael Frayn.
Also, it`s too early to determine if the grand performance pieces of Robert Wilson will survive him, or if the promise of August Wilson, Wallace Shawn and Christopher Durang will be fulfilled.
Time will tell.
A CENTURY AGO ON THE STAGE
In 1887, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, authors of the previous hits
”HMS Pinafore” and ”The Mikado,” opened their new operetta
”Ruddigore” at the Savoy Theatre in London.
August Strindberg of Sweden produced ”The Father,” a fierce battle (to the death) of the sexes, while Henrik Ibsen of Norway, the father of modern European drama and creator of ”A Doll`s House” and ”Ghosts,” recently had written, in 1886, the tragedy of ”Rosmersholm.”
Realism was the mode of the moment, having escalated into fierce naturalism in Emile Zola`s ”Therese Raquin” (1887) in France and modified into such genteel domestic comedies as ”The Magistrate” (1885), by Arthur Wing Pinero, in England. George Bernard Shaw, a novelist, critic and advocate of socialism, was struggling with the writing of his first play, ”Widowers`
Houses,” which would not be produced until 1892.
In the United States, the continuing hits included the dramatization of Harriet Beecher Stowe`s ”Uncle Tom`s Cabin” (1852), a dramatization of ”Rip Van Winkle,” by Joseph Jefferson and Dion Boucicault (1866), William Gillette`s Civil War drama, ”Held by the Enemy” (1886), and ”The Count of Monte Cristo,” with its popular leading man, James O`Neill, who had assumed the role in 1883.
