THAR 281 1st Edition Lecture 10 Outline of Last Lecture I Operetta a Gilbert and Sulivan II Oscar Wilde III George Shaw IV Noel Coward a Blithe Spirit V Emerging American Theatre a Minstrel shows b Burlesque c Vaudeville Outline of Current Lecture I Eugene O Neil II Thorton Wilder III Famous playwrights IV Little Theatres a Provincetown Players b Washington Square Playhouse These notes represent a detailed interpretation of the professor s lecture GradeBuddy is best used as a supplement to your own notes not as a substitute c The group theatre V Federal Theatre Project a Living Newspapers b Negro Theatre Project VI The Cradle will Rock Current Lecture Emerging American Drama I II III IV Eugene O Neil spent much of his life traveling with his parents while his father performed in plays His father s name was James O Neil and he is most famous for Count upon Crystal Eugene s mother was a drug addict Eugene was kicked out of Princeton because he was partying and became a sailor He was always very depressed and had thoughts of suicide Eugene is one of the three great playwrights along with Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams Eugene created the O Neil Theatre He experimented with many different kinds of forms but many had Greek elements such as tragedy and climatic plots His famous works are A moon for the misbegotten The Ice Man Cometh and Long Days Journey into Night Long days was written right before Eugene passed away He gave it to his wife and told her to not publish it for 25 years However she published it 12 years later Thorton Wilder wrote Our Town Some themes in our town are universality and richness of life Americana things that evoke American ways and nostalgia look back on simpler time Some other famous playwrights of this time was a Lilian Helman The Children s hour Little Foxes b Clifford Odets He was very gutsy and used Stanislavski s method His works were often called street poetry Awake and Sing Waiting for lefty and Golden Boy c Kaufman and Hart He wrote classic American comedies that were family friendly You Can t Take it with You The Man Who Came to Dinner Little Theatres was similar to Europeans independent movement These theatres pushed boundaries and created new playwrights Some say these theatres inspired the Broadway movement but there is not a direct connection a Provincetown players were rejected by the Washington Square Players They created social events and read O Neil s works Right before they opened up their own theatre the building caught on fire so they moved to NY Provincetown players created selective realism This was a small amount of props used on a V VI stage to set a scene The audience has to use their imagination to create the rest of the scene b Washington Square Playhouse s purpose was to showcase emerging playwrights They eventually evolved into the Theatre Guild creating an acting company based on Stanislavski s method c The group theatre was a noncommercial or was it a little theater Group theatres were in between Their main goal was to introduce Stanislavski s works The group theatre was fairly politically aligned and sympathetic to communists Four major influential theater people came from here including Herald Clureman Lee Strasberg Stella Adler and Sherald Crawford i Lee Stasburg founded actor studio He leaves the group theater over an acting dispute and went off and created his own Marilyn Monroe studied with him ii Stella Adler studied with Stanislavski She founded the Stella Adler studio Many great people have studied here Federal Theatre Project was provided with government subsidies to all of the theatre people that worked there a Living Newspapers dramatized actual events going on These didn t last long because they were critical of government and sympathetic to communists b Negro Theatre Project was all black people They used patient telling story devices Orson Welles was their director The most famous was A Voodoo McGee The Cradle will Rock was about a steel town USA attempting to unionize by Marc Blitzstein