20th Century American Drama Subcategories Evolution

Subcategories of 20th Century Drama

During the 20^th century, we found new different subcategories of drama:

• 1900-1950: Broadway (explained below)
• The Little Theatre Movement (explained below)
• Birth of Musical Theatre
• 1930s: The Federal Theatre Project (explained below).
• 1950s: Off-Broadway
• 1960s: Off-Off-Broadway

Broadway Theatre

Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, are theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theater District and Lincoln Center along Broadway, in the Manhattan borough of New York City. Along with London's West End theatres, Broadway theatres are widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.

Main Characteristics of Broadway

• Most of the theaters near Times Square were built in the 1920s and 1930s.
• Financial basis: mostly private enterprise.
• It dominated the theater scene in America until the 1950s.
• Strong sense of a small community of artists learning from each other.

The Little Theatre Movement

The Little Theatre Movement: The little theatre movement in U.S. theatre aimed to free dramatic forms and methods of production from the limitations of the large commercial theatres by establishing small experimental centres of drama. As the new medium of cinema was beginning to replace theatre as a source of large-scale spectacle, the Little Theatre Movement developed in the United States around 1912. In several large cities, beginning with Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and Detroit, companies formed to produce more intimate, noncommercial, and reform-minded entertainments.

The Provincetown Players

The Provincetown Players was a nonprofit theatre company started in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was the first modern theater devoted to producing original works by American playwrights. Famed for staging the first productions of plays by several important playwrights, including Eugene O'Neill and Susan Glaspell, the group employed many other notable writers, artists, and actors.

The Group Theatre

The Group Theatre was a New York City theatre collective formed by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg in 1931. It was intended as a base for the kind of theater they and their colleagues believed in — a forceful, naturalistic, and highly disciplined artistry. They were pioneers of what would become an "American acting technique" derived from the teachings of Konstantin Stanislavski, but pushed beyond them as well.