Three American Plays

📒 This book has been compiled to provide a representative selection of inid-twentieth century American drama. The first play, "Long Day's Journey into Night", by Eugene O'Neill, dates back to 1941. "The Autumn Garden", by Lillian Hellman, was written a decade later. "Orpheus Descending", by Tennessee Williams, was first produced in 1957. These plays, stemming from the pen of dramatists of different generations, reflect the continuity of a certain tradition in the American theater-that of larger-than-life realism. This tradition, which grew up after World War I, is still relevant today and is continuing to develop. It might seem that a wide gap separates the first experiments of Eugene O'Neill, who took the American stage by storm in the 1920's, from the recent plays by Tennessee Williams, who is quite active today, i.e. fifty years later. And yet, despite the dissimilarity of the subjects treated and the playwrights' individual style, these works have some common features: the common artistic approach to the dramatic characters, the authors' deep interest in people whose everyday activity is inseparable from their specific social environment and the period they live in, the unmistakably American key of their tragedy, and their undaunted search - despite illusions, delusions and disappointments - for moral and spiritual values in a society where the human personality comes to count for less and less.
The emotional power and tautness of Eugene O'Neill's dialogue, the profound psychology and nostalgic atmosphere set off by the caustic, pithy language of Lillian Hellman, and the striking composition and modern dramatism of Tennessee Williams's maimer will bring alive for the reader the contemporary American theater, whose fame has long since spread beyond national frontiers.