Reader's Guide to Modern American Drama

A comprehensive survey of modern American drama beginning with its antecedents in Victorian melodrama through to the present. Sternlicht discusses the work and achievement of more than seventy playwrights, from Eugene O'Neill to Susan-lori Parks--from the golden era of Broadway to the rise of Off-Broadway and regional theater. He shows how world theater influenced the American stage, and how the views of American dramatists reflected the great American social movements of their times. In addition, Sternlicht describes the contributions of the early Experimental theater, the Federal Theater of the 1930s, African American, feminist, and gay and lesbian drama--and the joyous trends and triumphs of American musical theater.