Contexts of American Plays After 1925

Angels in America features doubling (one actor playing two or more roles), Biblical allusions and visitations from angels, monologues by several of the main characters, and hallucinatory visions. It does not include deus ex machina, which is a theatrical device whereby something unexpected and unexplained intervenes to fix a plot problem and drastically alter the course of the play. (A famous deus ex machina occurs in Hamlet in the form of the pirates.)

This play not only premiered in but also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949. If you didn’t know this, you could still eliminate some of the answer choices if you knew that Arthur Miller wasn’t born until 1915.

Martha is a central character in Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and not in Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) wrote A Raisin in the Sun (1959).Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America (1993). Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966). August Wilson wrote Fences (1987). Adrienne Kennedy wrote A Lesson in Dead Language (1968). All of these authors are major award-winning, twentieth-century American playwrights.

This author is Arthur Miller, an important American playwright and essayist. Miller is famous for being married to Marilyn Monroe and for testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee as well as for his significant contributions to American drama, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and various other honors.

The Violent Bear It Away is actually a novel by Flannery O’Connor and not a play at all. The other four works are all dramas written by Miller between 1937 and 1955.

Although it was set several decades earlier, the play debuted in 1938 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama the same year.

Our Town (1938) is by the American playwright Thornton Wilder (1897-1975). It is one of his earlier works. August Strindberg wrote A Dream Play (1901). Sam Shepard wrote The Right Stuff (1983). August Wilson wrote The Coldest Day of the Year (1989). Lorraine Hansberry wrote The Drinking Gourd (1960). Aside from Strindberg, all of these playwrights are American.

Wilder’s 1942 play The Skin of Our Teeth also won the Pulitzer Prize. None of these other plays were written by him. The Crucible (1953) is by Arthur Miller. Glengarry Glen Ross (1983) is by David Mamet. The Lion in Winter (1966)is by James Goldman. Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) is by Eugene O'Neil.

The play takes place over the course of a single day in the lives of a dysfunctional Connecticut family. Although the play is extremely lavish in its description of the setting, all of the action of the play is restricted to that one location.