Williams and Miller: the Cold War and the Renewal of Tragedy

Abstract

The major impetus to the development of a distinctly American theatre with its own contribution to twentieth-century drama came from the visit of the Moscow Arts in 1923 and the influential teachings of its former members, Michael Chekhov and Richard Boleslavski, who were now emigres living in the United States.1 Between them they imparted something of the dramatic technique of Stanislavsky, whose attraction to Americans in the theatre became linked in the thirties with an affirmative political attitude towards the Soviet Union. The subsequent emergence of the Group Theatre under Lee Strasberg, Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Elia Kazan was an important step forward in the promotion of American political theatre. But although Stanislavskian techniques were used by the theatre, it soon became clear that they worked more effectively in drama about contemporary American life than in productions of Chekhov or Ibsen. The failure to produce great European drama was offset by the success of the attempt to produce a theatre relevant to the crises of contemporary America. Integral to this development was the work of Clifford Odets, the outstanding American playwright of the early thirties.