Contemporary American Drama

Annette Saddik

This book explores the development of contemporary theatre in the United

States in its historical, political and theoretical dimensions. It

focuses on representative plays and performance texts that experiment

with form and content, discussing influential playwrights and

performance artists such as Tennessee Williams, Adrienne Kennedy, Sam

Shepard, Tony Kushner, Charles Ludlum, Anna Deavere Smith, Karen Finley

and Will Power, alongside avant-garde theatre groups.

Saddik traces the development of contemporary drama since 1945, and

discusses the cross-cultural impact of postwar British and European

innovations on American theatre from the 1950s to the present day in

order to examine the performance of American identity. She argues that

contemporary American theatre is primarily a postmodern drama of

inclusion and diversity that destabilizes the notion of fixed identity

and questions the nature of reality.

Related Subjects

• Drama

About the Author

Annette Saddik is Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, CUNY. She is the author of .The Politics of Reputation: The Critical Reception of Tennessee Williams' Later Plays (AUP, 1999) and co-editor of .Entering Into Discourse: An Advanced Expository Writing Reader (Burgess Publishing, 1996). She is currently working on a book entitled .Performing Postmodernism: the Struggle for Cultural Identity on the American Stage.

top of page