Disputing the Canon of American Dramatic ‘Literature’

Abstract

In this article, Ronald Tavel argues that the commercial American theatre, endorsed by the American educational system and theatrical establishment, has never nurtured a vision of the scripted play as art – and has consequently produced no single example of it. The nation's genuine playwrights who saw their tasks as makers of art have, he claims, been neglected throughout American history, and left to wither in the wings. In the 1960s, Ronald Tavel founded and named the still-extant Theatre of The Ridiculous, and has written forty produced plays, a number of which have been translated into a dozen languages and staged in four continents. He has written and directed thirteen films for Andy Warhol: ten of these have recently been restored for international distribution by the New York Museum of Modern Art, and all are to be collected for publication later this year by Sun and Moon Press, Los Angeles. Ronald Tavel lives in Taipei, but is currently teaching a course on Warhol and the filmmaker-architect Jack Smith at the Art Centre College of Design in California. The American Institute in Taiwan selected the article which follows as the keynote address at the Seventeenth Annual Convention of the American Studies Association of the Republic of China.