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American drama in the 21st century owes a lot of its popular themes to works of its predecessors of Modernist and especially post-WWII periods. While the classic American drama of these periods includes writers such as Eugene O’Neill, Lillian Hellman, and Clifford Odets among the Modernists, as well as Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Lorraine Hansberry and Edward Albee among the most imaginative writers of the post-WWII period, displaying a wide array of approaches to reflecting the American reality, there are still a lot of groups of Americans that are underrepresented. At the same time, the tradition of modern American drama has created a number of typical American genres of plays that aimed at a representation of the American society as a whole. From O’Neill’s explorations of the historical roots of the American nation, to Williams’s memory plays and Hansberry’s racial dramas, the most typical American form has been the family drama. The American family, a microcosm within a macrocosm of the American society at large, is a reflection of transformations and an individualized case for criticism of the society’s failings in general. Still, more and more authors in the current times begin to question the universality of the genre and try to explore new ways of speaking about the American society, while at the same time updating the typical American genre of the family drama and its main representatives (Long Day’s Journey into Night, Death of a Salesman, and A Raisin in the Sun to name but the few most obvious examples), as well as other classics of the history of American theater of other genres (The Octoroon, Waiting for Lefty, and The Crucible to give a few recent examples of remade titles). In my talk, I will focus on several of these recent rewrites, especially those that do not merely revive classics but also interrogate their assumptions about gender, race, class, and power for contemporary audiences: assumptions both of the contemporary authors of the new versions but also of the original plays and their respective genres. The paper focuses primarily on the plays focusing on revisioning the family drama. With the question in mind, what kind of family is considered to be representative of a phenomenon presumably applicable to the American society as a whole (such as Willy Loman’s failure illustrative of the dissolution of the American Dream in post-Depression United States), it discusses family-centered plays such as August: Osage County (2007) by Tracy Letts, Appropriate (2013) by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, The Humans (2015) by Stephen Karam, and Fairview (2018) by Jackie Sibblies Drury. It shows that by paying homage to the classics, these contemporary revisions confirm the universality of the originals, while expanding their scope to an even more refined surgical view of various ailments of the ever-transforming American society.
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