In many remarkable respects, American drama is an oxymoronic concept whose terms have repelled and attracted each other since national inception. Foremost among the cultural institutions fled by the Puritans in their early-seventeenth-century sojourn in the New World was the English theater, where immoral behaviors proliferated, including offenses as specific as pickpocketing and prostitution and as generally questionable as relaxation and merrymaking. Worse yet was the stages obvious emphasis on the mystification, deception, sensationalism, and lavish display all long associated with Puritanisms theological arch-nemesis, Catholicism, and all threatening to steal thunder from the performative qualities (dare we say the entertainment value?) of the Puritan ministers own sermonizing (see also Davis, Plays and Playwrights, 22021). As the English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell created strict laws to rein in the popularity of the English theater, so the Protestant factions controlling various regions in the New World made life difficult to impossible for its budding theater troupes: the earliest known staged theatrical in the colonies, Ye Bare and Ye Cubbe (1665), comes down to us not in the play itself, now long lost, but in the legal transcripts describing the grounds on which its cast of players were hauled into court. And in his remarkable History of the American Theater (), William Dunlap notes the religious proclivities of various colonies of the mid-eighteenth century: landing among the Episcopalians of Williamsburg, Virginia, in June 1752, Lewis Hallams London (later American) Company thrived. As Arthur Hornblow reports, Williamsburg happily welcomed acting companies as early as 1716 (23), and players found an equally warm welcome in the southern provinces of Richmond, Charleston, and later French-Catholic New Orleans. Meanwhile, the doors of Puritan Boston remained officially closed to theater until 1793, and in Philadelphia, the Quakers, notably opposed to scenic representations (Dunlap, History , 13), gave thespians more trouble than did the Puritans.
Yet as Jeffrey H. Richards has observed, it was not only Puritans who objected to the stage. Theater was the province of the enemy, the British (xii), a distinction carried forward in the present-day dominance of the American theater scene by New York, the one American city of note held by the British for the entirety of the [Revolutionary] war (J. Richards, xii.) The earliest extant play published (though never performed) on US soil was Androboros (Gr. Man-Eater, c. 1714), a satire of the colonists misguided attempts to do away with their plaguey Keeper[s], including the royal governor of New York, Robert Hunter, who wrote the piece for the amusement of friends back home in England. Meanwhile, the earliest works by an American playwrightBenjamin Colemans Gustavas Vasa , performed by a group of Harvard students in 1690, and Thomas Godfreys The Prince of Parthia (1767), performed by Hallams company four years after the playwrights deathwere historical tragedies dealing only analogically, if even, with American themes. They were broadly indebted to numerous better-renowned dramas by the Bard himself (e.g., Richard III, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice ) and romantic tragedies like Thomas Otways Venice Preserved (1682) and Joseph Addisons Cato (1712). During the war British soldiers amused themselves with amateur theatricals, and General John Burgoyne, who wrote the historical drama The Blockade of Boston , was only one of several English wits who used the stage (or the printed satiric dialogue) to mock the American upstarts strategic missteps during the war. The January 8, 1776, production of Burgoynes Blockade was famously interrupted when a British soldier ran onstage to announce a Yankee attack on a royalist stronghold. The audience of redcoats, under the impression that the messenger was part of the cast, needed several minutes to respond to the actual call of battle.
Notably, Dunlap, who happily attended the theater from an early age, wrote numerous plays (most memorably Andr []) and adaptations, and for several years managed the American Company, himself belonged to a family of staunch royalists; though he might contest the assertion, Dunlap, in his History , recorded the Pennsylvania legislatures Dr. Logan as saying that theatres were only fit for monarchies (56), that they were weapons wielded by kings to subvert the republic (56) and weaken democratic feelings wherever they occurred. General Waynes canny counterclaim, that the Republic might have won the war with more ease had it made use of this same tool (57), is an early indication of the powerful and thus controversial effectsartistic, social, and politicalof popular media such as drama in American culture.
Thus although this text focuses on Drama in Dialogue for reasons in evidence throughout, we might just as well have foregrounded Dramatic Debates, Dramas Dilemmas, or even Dramatic Destruction! and still be telling at least half the story. Yet we will consider the more flexible form of the dramatized conversationsometimes harmonious, sometimes heated to riotous degreesbetween the American dramatic experiment and its numerous transatlantic touchstones, its changing historical contexts, and its ever-expanding canon of works. Specifically, American drama has been influencedif in fatefully oedipal fashionby the forms and contents successful since the Renaissance in its parent culture of Great Britain, as well as by melodrama from France, realism from Scandinavia and Russia, and expressionism and absurdism from diverse European originators of these forms. All the while, American dramatists, managers, and critics struggled to encourage a native style that indeed became visible almost immediatelybut almost always in dialogue with or, as early American playwright Royall Tyler would put it, in contrast to the European influences that were equally ever present. Each section of this text, therefore, opens by discussing one of the transatlantic touchstones integral to the development of American drama.
Despite both the religious intolerance and the patriot loyalism broadly in play during the Revolutionary era, both publically staged and private, at-home theatricals were a popular pastime. Even in Puritan-dominated Boston, subscriptions filled immediately to build a theater in 1796, a mere three years following repeal of a 40-year law banning public performance (Dunlap, History , 140). Again, ironically, the dramatic subject was almost always English or EuropeanShakespeare, Sheridan, English translations of the French Molire or the German Kotzebueas were the theater staff and players. With unstinting regularity, managers sailed back across the Atlantic to recruit their actors, and the theatrically vigorous community of Jamaica (Williams, 304) was a regular resting ground whenever theater became too controversial in the colonies or yellow fever raged too close to the stage door (see also Williams, 305). The aristocratic husband of one of Americas original sweetheartsthe lovely and talented Mrs. Ann Merrywould have been scandalized to let his wife cavort onstage before home audiences (Dunlap, History , 17576; see also Hornblow, 214). In the far-flung, socially meaningless provinces of the New World, however, she was allowed to ply her trade with success, and Americans took it for granted that all of their favorite stage actors hailed from the land of their recent mortal enemy. Even several of early American theaters most popular stage Yankeesnave yet forthright comical characters espousing the homespun views of American backwoodsmen, foot-soldiers, and greenhornswere British born, including Thomas Wignell, Joseph Jefferson I, and Charles Mathews.
