Four Contemporary American Playwrights : Exploring Identity

Omtale

The fourth in a series of books exploring the careers of 28 contemporary American playwrights, this book covers the work of Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Stephen Karam and Lucas Hnath. These award-winning playwrights deploy different dramatic strategies, even as they make their audiences complicit, acknowledging their presence, in plays which range widely in styles and approach. Christopher Bigsby interweaves critical analysis of their work with biographical information, contemporary responses and the writers' own comments on their work, drawn from interviews.At a time when the question of identity is central in America, at both a personal and national level, how far do playwrights see this as vital to their work? Bigsby reflects on this question in the context of the work of these playwrights, asking the extent to which their identity is central or incidental to their work. He argues that Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins' work often asks to what extent race is a construct, addressing what Jacobs-Jenkins calls the 'historical slipperiness of a concept like “blackness”' in neighbors, An Octoroon and Appropriate, while stepping away from race in Everybody. Tarell Alvin McCraney, who is conscious that being labelled as gay or black can influence the reception of his work, nonetheless embraces both in The Brothers Size, Choir Boy, Wig Out and his Oscar-winning film Moonlight. If Stephen Karam, from a Lebanese-American family, engages with gay characters, in Speech and Debate and The Humans, this book posits that he is also interested in suffering, something of which he had personal experience. Lucas Hnath approaches identity in another way, appropriating the lives of real characters, historical and contemporary (Isaac Newton, Anna Nicole Smith, Walt Disney, Hillary and Bill Clinton and even his mother in Dana H.), inhabiting and deconstructing them. In A Doll's House, Part 2 he appropriates the figure of Nora, presenting her identity in a newly imagined form.