The American Century: Literature since 1945 679Kern, then Lorenz Hart (1895–1943), Hammerstein teamed up with Richard Rodgers
(1902–1979). The result was Oklahoma! (1943), the first musical to use dance as an
integral part of the plot and a powerful celebration of the mainstream values of the
American West. It was followed by other successes: Carousel (1945), South Pacific
(1949), The King and I (1951), Flower Drum Song (1958), and The Sound of Music
(1959). Even after Hammerstein’s death, the success continued for his collaborator,
Rodgers, when he teamed up with Stephen Sondheim (1930–) and also went on to write
musicals by himself. Besides working with Kern, Hart, and Rodgers, Hammerstein
collaborated with George S. Kaufman (1889–1961) and Moss Hart (1904–1961). The
most remarkable outcome of this collaboration was Pal Joey (1940), based on a series
of sketches by John O’Hara about a seedy nightclub operator. Between them,
Hammerstein, Rodgers, and the various people they teamed up with from time to
time turned the musical into a characteristically American art form: a medium for
serious entertainment and, sometimes, for revealing the nation to itself.
As far as drama is concerned, what is remarkable about the work produced when
Broadway was at its height is its roots in domestic realism. This was not, however, a
limitation, since the finest American dramatists of the period used realism as a
means of exploring fundamental issues. Method acting helped to expand the
potential of realism here. With its emphasis on exploring the subtext, the emotional
drama lurking beneath the most mundane situations and talk, it encouraged
emotional adventure. The function and capacity of domestic realism could be
expanded, as a result, to reveal the dread – the fear of, and occasional triumph over,
disaster – that hovered below the surfaces of the everyday. As it happens, the careers
and styles of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams are exemplary. Those careers
reveal certain parallels. Both playwrights followed initial failure with a second play
that established a reputation and particular dramatic territory. Both produced, in a
third play, the finest of their career. Both went on to write some of the finest plays of
the 1950s, and ended the period of their greatest achievement in the early 1960s.
Their styles, however, reveal radical differences. Miller used realism to explore wider
moral and political issues; whereas Williams was more interested in deploying it to
explore emotional and psychological forces. Miller concentrated on the ordinary
person put under extraordinary pressure by their society, to be destroyed or survive.
Williams, on the other hand, focused on misfits: extraordinary people trying to bear
up against the ordinary pressures of life. For Miller, the orbit of attention was formed
by what he called “the Common Man.” “It matters not at all whether a modern play
concerns itself with a grocer or a president,” he once declared, “if the intensity of the
hero’s commitment to his cause is less than the maximum possible.” To pursue
this, he fashioned an idiom that replicated both the clarity and the misperceptions
of the vernacular: the direct poetry of the street that, sometimes, people use to
conceal the truth from themselves. For Williams, what mattered was the common
humanity that connects the uncommon, the outsider to the rest of us, the aberrant
to the average. And to dramatize that, he devised a language that, at its best, was
subtly poetic, rhythmic and emotional. These two major dramatists in effect
measured the diverse potential of domestic realism – stretched out, when necessary,GGray_c05.indd 679ray_c 05 .indd 679 8 8/1/2011 7:31:38 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 38 PM