Modern American Drama, 1945–2000

The political theatre of the sixties and seventies seemed a long way removed from the avant-garde concerns of the Living Theatre, the Performance Group and the Open Theatre. In fact they had a good deal in common. Not merely were those groups politicised in due course but black theatre, women's theatre, Chicano theatre were also in the business of transformation. For them, too, language was suspect. They, too, sought a closer identification between performer and audience. If performance theatre wished to strip away illusion and deceit in order to expose the real, then so, too, did a theatre for which that process was both a therapeutic and a political act. If the Living Theatre spilled out of the theatre onto the streets, as a deliberate act of provocation, then this was also a logical move for those whose natural audience associated the theatre building with the very system against which they were in revolt. On the west coast the San Francisco Mime Troupe fought a legal battle to secure the right to perform its political fables in a public park as El Teatro Campesino staged its agit-prop sketches in the fields of California's agro-businesses; on the east coast no anti-war rally was complete without the Bread and Puppet Theatre or the more ephemeral groups presenting agit-prop allegories of the urban guerilla confronted by the technological American ogre. Ralph Ellison has said that when American life is most American it is apt to be most theatricalised. That has never been as true as it was in the 1960s, a decade in which performance was a cultural and social imperative, whether it was the theatricalised costuming of a generation in kaftans and psychedelic clothes or the public display of political commitments in marches and demonstrations.