Abstract

The New American Drama

The article discusses performing arts. Perhaps neither American drama nor American novels have achieved that perfection of form which alone is capable of enabling any work of literary art to endure beyond the age in which it is written, but American plays, like American novels, have at least been the result of a conscientious effort to be as sincere and as significant as their authors could make them. And though graybeards lament the decline since even the recent days of playwright Augustin Daly and writer Katherine Mansfield, one cannot regret the change which has given the dramas of playwrights S.M. Behrman, Maxwell Anderson, in place of those of British playwright Dion Boucicault, Clyde Fitch, and Bronson Howard. Perhaps the plays of the generation before this were better acted.