Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

258 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
This 2014 production of Hair at the Hollywood Bowl, directed by Adam Shankman, proves that the 1968 musical
still has legs—along with other parts of the human body—as the show, in the words of theatre critic Charles
McNulty, “allows baby boomers to feel cool again and millennials to sample the rhythms of what must seem to
them a mythological generation.” © Lawrence K. Ho/Los Angeles Times
Wendy Wasserstein, Margaret Edson, Suzan-Lori Parks,
Lynn Nottage, Annie Baker) have received Pulitzer Prizes
and five (Anna Deveare Smith, Naomi Wallace, Mary
Zimmerman, Lynn Nottage, Sarah Ruhl) have been honored
with MacArthur “genius” awards. Women directors,
once a rarity, now helm some of the most critically
acclaimed and successful American plays: Julie Taymor,
Anna Shapiro, Pam McKinnon, Rebecca Taichman, Jo
Bonney, Susan Stroman, and Tina Landau are some of the
most sought-after directors on and off Broadway. Meanwhile,
feminist theatre ensembles—groups of women presenting
plays by, about, and for women—have emerged
throughout the United States. While diverse in their
approaches, such theatre companies share a broad goal of
presenting plays about women’s experiences by focusing
on topics such as gender-role stereotyping, abortion, pregnancy,
motherhood, rape, mother-daughter relationships,
sexual orientation, domestic violence, women’s history,
violence against women, and female incarceration.
The increased racial diversification of American
theatre shows a similar development. Until the mid-
1950s, the American dramatic repertoire was almost
entirely written by, for, and about white people. Talented
black writers were hardly ever able to secure
productions, and even the best black actors were often
reduced to playing the roles of servants and “exotic”
roles. But in the decades following World War II,
drama that focused on the lives of black Americans
began to surge forward in the culture. Lorraine Hansberry’s
1959 A Raisin in the Sun, a realistic study
of black family life, marked the first appearance of
a black playwright on Broadway, and its director,
Lloyd Richards, became the first black director in
the American theatrical mainstream. Soon, the black
theatre had become a truly revolutionary force with
the startling work of Amiri Baraka, whose Dutchman
and The Toilet appeared off-Broadway in 1964 and
confronted American racism with astonishing ferocity.
Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones) refused
to shrink from revolutionary violence, and his gutwrenching
urban plays provided a startling wakeup
call not only to American society but also to the
American stage. In 1967, actors Robert Hooks and
Douglas Turner Ward created the Negro Ensemble
Company, bringing forth dramatist Lonne Elder III’s
eloquent Ceremonies in Dark Old Men in 1969 and
continuing to flourish to the present day, and in 1982
Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, about the murder
of a black soldier in the American South, received
the Pulitzer Prize.