Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and the American Family

Author(s):  
Brenda Murphy
Author(s):  
Eileen J. Herrmann

Realism in American drama has proved its resiliency from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century to its transformation into modern theater in the twentieth century. This chapter delineates the evolution of American realistic drama from the influence of European theater and its adaptation by American artists such as James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers. Flexible enough to admit the expressionistic techniques crafted by Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill and leading to the “subjective realism” of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, realism has provided a wide foundation for subsequent playwrights such as David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard to experiment with its form and language.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (44) ◽  
pp. 46-71
Author(s):  
Rasha Abdulmunem Azeez ◽  

Reading and analyzing Paula Vogel’s plays, the readers can attest that she achieves success in drama or theater because she is passionate about theater. Vogel is a modern American playwright who won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for drama. Her success and insight in playwriting or in adapting do not come all of a sudden; she is influenced by many writers. Vogel is influenced by many American dramatists, including Eugene O’ Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee, and by other non-American writers, including August Strindberg, Anton Chekhove, and Bertolt Brecht. Certainly, there were female playwrights who wrote preeminent plays and they influence Vogel as well. Nevertheless, dramas by female writers, as a matter of fact, remain marginalized. This paper focuses on the influence of some female playwrights on Vogel.


Author(s):  
Yasir M. Abdullah

Idealism is a pivotal motto of the propaganda led and announced by America's pursuit of the dream since its establishment in the new world, but what has emerged as a dream has ended up as an illusion. The aim of this paper is to expose how Arthur Miller portrays the collapse of the ideal father figure in an exemplary American family at the time when the pursuit for personal and familial betterment was used to disguise materialistic corruption and egoistic thirst for social mobility in American society at the expense of values and ethics.


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