Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Contemporary American Drama
Since 1970 American theater has variously entertained, challenged, offended,
and edified audiences with productions that might uphold, question, or reject
popular tastes, traditions, taboos, and mores. Veteran Broadway playwrights
such as Neil Simon and Edward Albee continued to produce popular plays.
They were joined by a profusion of new artists fostered and encouraged by the
emergence of Off Broadway and the expansion of regional professional theater
that had begun in the 1950s and 1960s. As had been true in the turbulent 1960s,
a wealth of dramatists, composers, and lyricists in subsequent decades drew
particular inspiration from political movements and protests opposing war (in
Vietnam and the Middle East) and discrimination based on race, gender, and
sexual orientation.
Vietnam, the Middle East, and American Drama
The Vietnam War and its aftermath, when Americans did not always cheer their
returning troops, elicited an array of thought-provoking plays. Between 1969 and
1976 David Rabe, a Vietnam veteran, crafted four disturbing and, at times, sur-
real dramas on this contentious era in the nation’s history. In Sticks and Bones, The
Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel, The Orphan (based on Aeschylus’s trilogy Ores-
teia), and Streamers he depicted the debilitating, dehumanizing, and desensitizing
effects of war on new soldiers, seasoned combatants, their families, and American
society. Stephen Metcalfe’s characters struggle to comprehend the deaths of their
sons and friends in Vietnam in his one-act plays Sorrows and Sons and Spittin’
Image (both 1986). From their wartime experiences eight veterans crafted Trac-
ers (1980), a theatrical collage of explicit and arresting stories and scenes about
such realities as boot camp, search-and-destroy missions, drug and alcohol abuse,
rats, Saigon brothels, and body bags; sound effects and rock music complemented
these vignettes.
Returned veterans and their readjustment (societal, psychological, emo-
tional) to stateside life received sensitive, compelling, even humorous portrayals
in many dramas. Among them are Medal of Honor Rag (1975), by Tom Cole;
An Evening with Dead Essex (1978), by Adrienne Kennedy; James McLure’s
Lone Star and Pvt. Wars (both 1979) and Laundry and Bourbon (1980); Strange
Snow (1983), by Stephen Metcalfe; The Speed of Darkness (1991), by Steve
Tesich; and Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July (1978) and The Rosewood Curtain
(1993).
Later U.S. military involvements in the Middle East similarly evoked stage
works from prominent playwrights. Two Rooms (1998) by Lee Blessing focuses
on an American hostage in Lebanon. Tony Kushner’s Homebody/Kabul (1999;
revised, 2004) explores the beauty and devastation of Afghanistan. The Iraq wars
shadow States of Shock (1991), by Sam Shepard, Charles L. Mee’s Iphigenia 2 .0
(2007), and Beast (2008), by Michael Weller (author of the 1970 Vietnam play
Moonchildren).