The American Century: Literature since 1945 689Living Theatre transplanted to Europe: all moved away from a drama that was
author and text based. They turned to improvisation, using a text only as a departure
point, to mime, dance, and ritual. And they deployed techniques like “transformation”
in which actors would suddenly switch roles or even plays, or make some other
radical alteration in the fictive reality they were creating. This was a theater of
change, process. And, quite apart from the very particularized forms of theatrical
experiment that it produced, it was to have a significant impact on a much wider
range of American drama. American playwrights, most of them, never surrendered
their allegiance to domestic realism. But, even more than before, they were
encouraged to expand and embellish it, to push it to new frontiers.
Among those dramatists who took advantage of the new opportunities for
improvisation and experiment during this period were Jean-Claude van Itallie
(1936–), John Guare (1938–), Jack Gelber (1932–2003), and Arthur Kopit (1937–).
Born in Belgium but raised in the United States from the age of 4, van Itallie became
playwright in residence with the Open Theatre in the 1960s. His work with the group
includes American Hurrah (1966) and The Serpent (1968). Both plays are intensely
anti-realistic, using disconnected scenes, improvised responses, mime, ritual, and
stylized movement to explore national and biblical themes. Similarly resistant to the
constraints of realism are The House of Blue Leaves (1971) by Guare and The
Connection (1952) by Gelber. In the Guare play, slapstick farce mixes with pathos
and a series of bizarre events invoke a strange mix of characters that include a deaf
starlet, an insane bomber, three nuns, and the pope. In The Connection, in turn,
Gelber imitates the random, shapeless existence of the heroin addicts who form his
subject in the free-form movement of his play. And the improvised, chaotic character
of the addicts’ lives meets its response in the presence on stage of jazz musicians,
who break into music at apparently random moments in the action. Arthur Kopit
achieved fame with Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m
Feelin’ So Sad (1962). The absurd title is matched by the absurdist action of the play
in which the fabulously wealthy mamma of the title travels the world with the dead
body of her husband, a talking fish, two giant Venus fly-traps, and a son whom she
insists on calling by whatever name first comes to mind. There is, however, a serious
point buried in Kopit’s play, about the bizarre strategies people use to protect
themselves from a fundamentally hostile, terrifying world. And the seriousness at
the heart of the absurdism is even more noticeable in Kopit’s other notable success,
Indians (1968). Here, Kopit uses the bizarrely symbolic figure of “Buffalo” Bill Cody,
and his traveling Wild West show, to explore American mythmaking: the way the
nation has habitually suppressed knowledge of its past by transforming the actual
into the apocryphal, moral guilt into mythical innocence.
Of the many dramatists who discovered the freedom first to experiment outside
Broadway, the most notable are Edward Albee (1928–), Sam Shepard (1943–), and,
to a lesser extent, Lanford Wilson (1937–2011) and David Mamet (1947–). The first
play by Edward Albee to be produced, first in Berlin in 1959, then in New York in
1960, The Zoo Story, introduced many of his obsessive themes: alienation, the human
need and terror of contact, a nameless existential fear that seems to haunt all butGGray_c05.indd 689ray_c 05 .indd 689 8 8/1/2011 7:31:39 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 39 PM