Toward Postmodernism: The Political Theater of the 1960s

Abstract

As established structures of hegemony began to crumble in the 1960s under the pressure of student protests, anti-war and Civil Rights movements at home, and liberation movements abroad, profound changes took place in the cultural realm as well. On the American stage, it was the year 1959 that signaled what critics have called the disruption of “the bourgeois dream of unproblematic production” (both with regard to industrial and cultural production).1 That year saw the premiere of Edward Albee’s Zoo Story, the Living Theater’s staging of Jack Gelber’s The Connection, Allan Kaprow’s yet unclassifiable 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, and the belated break-through of black theater with Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun—all of which shook Broadway out of the complacency of a “well-made” bourgeois realism that had marked its repertoire throughout the 1940s and 1950s. While critics were still unsure what to make of these various attacks on white middle-class drama, they agreed that this new theater was certainly an “uncomfortable” and “confrontational” one. According to observers such as Howard Stein, “The middle classes were attacked in ways that were deliberately disturbing and provocative, whether through bizarre forms (Kopit), unseemly characters (Gelber), or vicious relationships (Albee).”2