The Jewish-Irish Modern American Drama

Abstract

Abstract Beginning with Lawrence Langner and Bernard Shaw’s argument over a character known as “The Jew” in the latter’s play Geneva (1938), this chapter outlines the effects of Irish drama and Irishness on major contributors to socially progressive or proletarian theater in America: Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets, Stella Adler, and Arthur Miller. It also contextualizes such drama with the negative affects of tenement fiction, shame for instance, and traces the collaboration between Irish and Jewish practitioners in advancing modern drama. In addition to discussing the impact of Shaw and O’Casey on American drama, the chapter also considers their relation to Judaism and to larger critiques of industrial capitalism, including the redaction of stereotypes. The chapter also intimates the lingering influence of the nineteenth-century stage on modern drama, concluding with a discussion of this phenomenon in the later work of Eugene O’Neill, which shares numerous similarities with melodrama and the socially progressive drama of Odets and Rice.