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The Depression of the 1930s had left many questioning the extent to which the America envisioned by the Founding Fathers , the America of idealism, of optimism, and of equality, had really succeeded. The old American values – happy families ensconced behind white picket fences, in rural small towns – these values were now disappearing from the American imagination as a reflection of anything other than a deluded utopianism. If the Depression had not been enough to savage such rosy idealisms, the reality of the second world war certainly would be. As Christopher Bigsby writes: "American notions of the autonomous self, secure and morally inviolable, seemed suddenly more difficult to sustain. The enemy was no longer simply modernity, the inhuman scale, the mechanical rhythms against which Eugene O’Neill and Elmer Rice, Sidney Kingsley and the young Miller and Williams had railed. It was a flaw in the sensibility that made betrayal seem a natural impulse and the self complicit...

Watch this video and consider the following (ALERT! Contains plotspoilers!): 1) What do we learn about each of the characters in this scene? Try mapping out each of the characters and comparing this scene with the descriptions of the characters at the beginning of the play. Watch this video and consider the following: 1) What is it that makes Ralph 'sing'? 2) Why does Jacob suggest that 'a woman insults a man's soul'? 3) Which character do you have most sympathy with? Watch this video and consider the following: 1) The opening of this scene finds Jacob reading from a communist manifesto. Why does this seem ironic? 2) Again, where do your sympathies lie in this scene? Are you convinced by Jacob? Watch this video and consider the following: 1) Bessie has, up to now, been a rather unsympathetic character. How does this scene explain the way she is? 2) Do you blame Bessie for her pragmatism? 3) Who do you think is in ...

"The Great Depression", writes Anne Fletcher, "no doubt defined the American 1930s" (2007, p. 108). It is perhaps difficult for us to understand the impact of the Depression in American in the 1930s. True, Britain had experienced its own elongated depression following two world wars which had crippled the nation financially. But for America, such deprivations made a far starker contrast to what had gone before.  Although many Americans had opposed any intervention in the war in Europe, economically the war had not hurt the nation it the way it had European countries. By the end of the war, American had leapfrogged the major European super-powers to become to most powerful nation in the world, both militarily and economically. The increased productivity for the war effort, as well, had brought about almost 100 percent employment levels, and when the restrains of wartime expenditure were lifted by the wars end, a brief peri...

By the end of the nineteenth century, the problem of production monopolies such as the Syndicate and the Schubert Brothers, and their stultifying effect on theatre, had been countered in Europe by the development of experimental and fringe theatre companies, which allowed playwrights like Strindberg , Maeterlink , Prinadello , Shaw , and later Brecht and Beckett , to produce plays which were innovative and challenging to a social order controlled by a bourgeoisie which was not in the controlling position of footing the bill for the event. In America, it would take another couple of decades before a capitalist monopoly on theatre would be effectively countered by an independent and experimental theatre. This movement, known as the Little Theatre movement (and which would later be known as 'off-Broadway' theatre), inspired independent thinkers and writers in a number of cities to group together to share ideas and encourage each other. In New York City one such g...