Ebook: Twenty-First-Century Dramatists

Many of the American playwrights who dominated the 20th century are no longer with us: Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Sam Shepard, Neil Simon, August Wilson and Wendy Wasserstein. A new generation, whose careers began in this century, has emerged, and done so when the theatre itself, along with the society with which it engages, was changing. Capturing the cultural shifts of 21st-century America, Staging America explores the lives and works of 8 award-winning playwrights – including Ayad Akhtar, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Young Jean Lee and Quiara Alllegría Hudes – whose backgrounds reflect the social, religious, sexual and national diversity of American society.
Each chapter is devoted to a single playwright and provides an overview of their career, a description and critical evaluation of their work, as well as a sense of their reception. Drawing on primary sources, including the playwrights’ own commentaries and notes, and contemporary reviews, Christopher Bigsby enters into a dialogue with plays which are as various as the individuals who generated them.
An essential read for theatre scholars and students, Staging America is a sharp and landmark study of the contemporary American playwright.
Staging America offers a critical account of eight award-winning playwrights whose careers began in the present century and who reflect the complexities of American identity. Among their number are a Pakistani-American, a Puerto Rican-American and a Korean-American, writers who are Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, gay, straight. Here are writers for whom details of their own lives provide the motor force of their plays, as there are those who reach out into the wider world. Beyond a critical analysis of their work, this is a study which includes their own comments as it does reviewers’ responses. The American theatre is changing, as is the society it reflects and with which it engages. Staging America reflects that fact as it does the stylistic variety of writers whose first experience is often in staged readings, small venues, and even across the Atlantic before they receive the kind of recognition which underlines their significance to the national story.