Hey there! I'm Mike Rugnetta, this is Crash Course Theater, and yes,

They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway. They say there's always magic in the air.

They say that by mid-century Broadway had become a home for Serious Plays.

A theater district best known for scantily clad chorus girls and questionable racial and ethnic stereotypes finally made a commitment to serious drama.

Because when you've been through a devastating World War and your sense of good in the world is profoundly shaken, maybe kick lines don't cut it anymore.

And besides, Broadway was losing out to movies and this, newfangled thing called television.

So a bunch of theaters had closed. They had to try something.

And what they tried was a kind of realism influenced by modernist structures and styles.

Today we'll be looking at two titans and one tight Ness of post-war Broadway drama: Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Lorraine Hansberry. Lights up.

Let's start with this guy, Thomas Lanier Williams, better known as Tennessee, because, I mean, his pen names go. That's awesome.

He was born in Mississippi in 1911 and grew up unhappily in St. Louis Missouri.

He rattled around for a while working as a stock boy at a shoe company and writing for local theater troupes.

But in 1944, he had his first big success with The Glass Menagerie,

a semi-autobiographical memory play with a character named Tom who steps in and out of the action,

Other characters were modeled after his mother and sister.

In some ways, it's a typical American family drama.

But in other ways, it reaches beyond realism to something more poetic and abstract.

As Williams wrote in his production notes. It was part of a call for quote:

"A new, plastic theater which must take the place of the exhausted theater of realistic conventions

if the theater is to resume vitality as part of our culture." So there.

It's not that Williams's theater is unrealistic. Well, I mean, some of it is.

But rather that, it's trying to get in touch with the passion and myth that underlies reality, a little like symbolism and a little like Expressionism.

His greatest work is A Streetcar Named Desire, which opened on Broadway in 1947, won the Pulitzer Prize and ran for 855 performances.

Now, that may seem like a lot and it is. That is a ton of shows.

It's at New Orleans in the home of Stanley and Stella Kowalski.

at the beginning of the play, Stella's sister Blanche arrives for a visit under mysterious circumstances.

She and Stanley dislike each other immediately.

She thinks that Stanley, a working-class guy who likes beer and poker games, is a brute.

And he thinks that Blanche who takes long baths and throws scarves over lamps in an effort to create a kind of magic is a phony.

They've both got their points and Williams has sympathy for both of them.

Blanche is a broken woman clinging desperately to her illusions and while Stanley may be brutish. He has moments of longing and pathos to.

Through these characters the Play charts collisions between illusion and reality dream

and violent awaken and new and old ideas of what it means to be an American.

Streetcar was a hit on Broadway and at the movies.

Remember Method Acting that American corruption of Stanislavski and actor training?

Well, this is how a lot of America first got to know it.

Because Marlon Brando and his tight white T-shirt our method as heck.

Brando played the role of Stan Lee on Broadway and in the movie.

Under Elia Kazan's direction, who you remember from our episode on the group theatre,

he mumbled and sweated and shouted Scala Scala. And sing hot in here. Or is it just method.

That was pretty much everything that actors weren't supposed to do.

But the method was styled at valorized emotional truth over craft, boring stuff like posture and diction. And audiences were into it. Yorick!

The next great serious playwright to land on Broadway was this guy, Arthur Miller, born in Manhattan in 1915.

He was an upper-middle class kid until the stock market crashed and his father's business failed.

Some of which he worked out in his late play The Price.

Like Eugene O'Neill and Williams, Miller was a semi-autobiographical writer and one who helped to enshrine the Family Play as the major American style.

Like Williams, his plays are written in a style that blends realism and expressionism,

though Miller's concerns are more pointedly political and he's way less interested in his female characters, unless they're witches. And even then, hmm.

After high school, Miller worked for several years until he'd saved up enough money to attend the University of Michigan where he began to write plays.

He lands it on Broadway in 1944, the same year as Williams, with The Man Who Had All The Luck.

It flopped. So I guess it wasn't that autobiographical.

Miller's fortunes shifted three years later with All My Sons.

His big deal play Death of a Salesman opened in 1949 and ran for 742 performances. It won a Pulitzer too.

The play is a tragedy centered on Willy Loman, the unsuccessful salesman of the title.

Miller said he wrote the play to "cut through time like a knife through a layer of cake or a road through a mountain revealing its geologic layers,

and instead of one incident in one timeframe succeeding another, display past and present concurrently."

His initial set design idea was to have the set housed inside a giant skull.