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

Theatre 259
Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love portrays various events in the life of the English classical scholar and poet
A. E. Housman from age eighteen to seventy-seven, not only by jumping backward and forward in time but also
by imagining through intriguing same-time conversations between the young Housman (played by Robert Sean
Leonard, right) and Housman as a just-deceased old man (played by Richard Easton), here shown—along with their
reflections—sitting on a fallen antique monument (another postmodern touch) on the River Styx in Hades (the land of
the dead). Both Leonard and Easton won Tony Awards for their Housman portrayals in the 2001 Broadway season.
Sets and costumes are by Bob Crowley; lighting is by Brian MacDevitt. © Paul Kolnik
The early 1980s brought to the fore the extraordinary
August Wilson, whose ten-play dramatic cycle is
an unparalleled achievement, treating different aspects
of American black life in each of the ten decades of the
twentieth century. Wilson’s plays received dozens of
awards—including two Pulitzer Prizes—and have been
regularly revived on Broadway and in regional theatres
since his untimely death in 2005. And in the current
century, two African American women dramatists
have received Pulitzer awards: Suzan-Lori Parks for
Topdog/Underdog in 2002 and Lynn Nottage for Ruined
in 2009, while in recent Broadway seasons, more black
women playwrights—including Parks (with her adaptation
of Porgy and Bess), Katori Hall (The Mountaintop),
Lydia R. Diamond (Stick Fly)—have had works presented
on the “Great White Way.” As black playwrights,
directors, and actors increasingly populate mainstream
Broadway and regional American theatre, the movement
to create dedicated black ensembles has faded, though
certainly not disappeared.