Modern American Drama: Playwriting in the 1990s

Voices, Documents, New Interpretations

Sharon Friedman, Cheryl Black

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350215467
• eBook ISBN: 9781350153660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama

The Decades of Modern American Playwriting series provides a comprehensive survey and study of the theatre produced in each decade from the 1930s to 2009 in eight volumes. Each volume equips readers with a detailed understanding of the context from which work emerged: an introduction considers life in the decade with a focus on domestic life and conditions, social changes, culture, media, technology, industry and political events; while a chapter on the theatre of the decade offers a wide-ranging and thorough survey of theatres, companies, dramatists, new movements and developments in response to the economic and political conditions of the day. The work of the four most prominent playwrights from the decade receives in-depth analysis and re-evaluation by a team of experts, together with commentary on their subsequent work and legacy. A final section brings together original documents such as interviews with the playwrights and with directors, drafts of play scenes, and other previously unpublished material. The major playwrights and their plays to receive in-depth coverage in this volume include:
* Tony Kushner: Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Part One and Part Two (1991), Slavs! Thinking About the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness (1995) and A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds (1997);
* Paula Vogel: Baltimore Waltz (1992), The Mineola Twins (1996) and How I Learned to Drive (1997);
* Suzan-Lori Parks: The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World (1990), The America Play (1994) and Venus (1996);
* Terrence McNally: Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), Love! Valour! Compassion! (1997) and Corpus Christi (1998).

1

Introduction to the 1990s

Cheryl Black

The last decade of the twentieth century is framed by two world-changing events: the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, heralding the end of the Cold War between America (Western democracy) and the Soviet Union (Eastern European communism), and the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers by the militant organization al-Qaeda on 11 September 2001, an event that triggered America’s ‘war on terrorism’ now entering its fifteenth year.¹

From the vantage point of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the 1990s, before 9/11 and before the fiscal debacle of 2007–8, was an era of relative peace and prosperity, dominated (for most of the decade) by a charismatic and moderately liberal president whose approval rating peaked at 73 per cent during his final year in office despite a steady stream of sexual and other scandals that led to his impeachment for perjury and obstruction of justice. It is a decade that has recently evoked a wave of nostalgia. In 2015, New York Times writer Kurt Anderson proclaimed the 1990s the ‘best decade ever’, citing economic prosperity; dramatic reductions in violent crime and in deaths from HIV/AIDS; an international ‘tide of progress’ marked by the fall of the Soviet Union, the end of South African apartheid and the normalizing of relations with China; vibrant cultural expression in music, literature and film; and ‘just the right amount of technology’.²

Like Clinton’s presidency, however, the decade was marked by profound contradictions and has also been characterized as a ‘best of times, worst of times’ historical moment,³ when the scientific and technological advances that created dot.com billionaires, cloned mammals and genetically modified crops inspired awe and anxiety in roughly equal proportions. It was a decade when the increased visibility and audibility of cultural minorities cracked the surface of mainstream complacency, revealing troubling undercurrents of sexism, racism and homophobia. It was a decade when the term ‘media frenzy’ entered the lexicon to describe the excessive zeal on the part of the media to satisfy public obsession with the decade’s sensationally (in)famous events that rocked the nation, harbingers of even worse disasters (natural, political, military and economic) to come.

Politics

The Clinton presidency

The media feeding frenzy found much to relish during the presidential election of 1992. The Republicans had held the White House for twelve years, and the Republican candidate, incumbent President George H. W. Bush, who had also served for eight years as vice president during the administration of his party’s revered Ronald Reagan, must have thought a second term would be a slam dunk. Bush was also a decorated veteran of the Second World War and had waged his own military ‘operation’ in Iraq in 1991, after which his approval rating rocketed to 90 per cent. His Democratic challenger was the largely unknown Arkansas governor Bill Clinton, whose campaign was plagued by accusations of draft-dodging and sexual indiscretions. Clinton was also the first presidential candidate to admit to having experimented with smoking pot, although he notably denied inhaling. In April 1992, New York Times reporter Wick Allison proclaimed that Clinton did not have a prayer and urged Democrats to snag the third party candidate, eccentric Texas billionaire Ross Perot, as their nominee.⁴

The tide began to turn, however, as the economic recession (begun in summer 1990) worsened and unemployment continued to rise. In August 1992, the nation was devastated by the most destructive hurricane in US history, Hurricane Andrew, which caused sixty-five deaths and over $65 billion in damage.⁵ Bush’s approval dropped to 30 per cent. Meanwhile his running mate, incumbent Vice President Dan Quayle, was widely ridiculed for his inability to spell ‘potato’ on national TV. Although Clinton was criticized for choosing Tennessee senator Al Gore (a fellow Southerner) as his running mate, the ‘Baby Boomer’ ticket (at ages forty-five and forty-four, respectively, the youngest White House team in history) appealed to MTV’s ‘Rock the Vote’ generation,⁶ and Clinton’s saxophone solo on the Arsenio Hall show in June 1992 sealed the deal. Clinton’s crackerjack campaign team focused on the recession, and ‘it’s the economy stupid’ became the iconic slogan of his winning campaign. In November 1992, Clinton won a decisive election, garnering 370 electoral votes (to Bush’s 168) and 43 per cent of the popular vote (to Bush’s 37.5 per cent and Perot’s 18.9 per cent).⁷ In true 1990s paradoxical fashion, Clinton’s lead strategist James Carville and Republican campaign director Mary Matalin, who had alluded to Clinton in a 1992 New York Times article as a ‘philandering, pot-smoking draft dodger’,⁸ were married in 1993.

As soon as Clinton took office, a fierce counter-attack was launched by conservative Republicans, spearheaded by Congressman Newt Gingrich. Gingrich and Congressman Richard Armey authored a ‘Contract With America’ that promised smaller government, lower taxes and other conservative reforms. As a result, the Republicans swept the 1994 elections, winning majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in forty years, and Gingrich became Speaker of the House in 1995. Despite this setback, and an increasingly polarized political climate, Clinton, for the most part, fulfilled his campaign promises to generate economic growth, expand world trade, tackle crime and drug use, cut taxes on the middle class and move people from welfare to work.⁹ Economic prosperity was his greatest achievement. Inheriting a budget deficit of 3.8 per cent, he left office with a budget surplus of 2.3 per cent.¹⁰ The unemployment rate dropped from 7.5 per cent in 1992 to 4 per cent in 2000.¹¹ According to historian Mark White, Clinton can claim to have been ‘the most successful economic president’ of all time in terms of performance on these issues.¹² Along with Clinton, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan was lauded as author of the economic boom. The ‘boom’, however, did not significantly reverse income inequality. By the end of the decade, Greenspan admitted that ‘the gains have not been as widely spread across households as I would like’.¹³ Writing in the early twenty-first century, historians compared the economic boom of Clinton’s administration to other, unstable ‘boom’ and ‘bust’ eras, labelling the 1990s ‘the roaring nineties’, ‘the new Gilded Age’ and ‘the greediest decade in history’.¹⁴

International relations

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama’s bestselling The End of History and the Last Man posited Western liberal democracy as the last and best form of human government.¹⁵ Colin Harrison has argued, however, that Fukuyama revealed a ‘hubristic’ complacency following the collapse of apartheid and communism that may have encouraged America’s subsequent ‘regime-change’ interventions.¹⁶ Although America avoided prolonged military engagement during the 1990s, several interventions that hovered somewhere between peacekeeping and nation-building laid the foundation for increasingly tense international relations. In 1991, President George H. W. Bush authorized ‘Operation Desert Storm’, which, in ten days, effected the liberation of Kuwait from invading Iraqi forces and elicited an agreement from Iraq to end support of international terrorism. During Clinton’s administration, ‘Operation Restore Hope’, an effort to intervene in Somalia’s Civil War, led to a disastrous attempted raid in Mogadishu in October 1993. Somali militia shot down two US Blackhawk helicopters, and the subsequent attempt to rescue the helicopter crews resulted in the deaths of twelve US soldiers and seventy-eight injured. After the battle, the bodies of two American soldiers were dragged through the streets.¹⁷ Stung by the Somalian debacle, the US largely ignored the genocidal wars that raged in Rwanda (1990–4) and the military and ethnic conflicts following the dissolution of Yugoslavia that spanned the decade (1991–2001).¹⁸

At about the same time the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, two militant extremist organizations were formed, Hezbollah al-Hejaz and al-Qaeda, determined to end Western (especially American) influence in the Middle East. In 1992, al-Qaeda operatives bombed two hotels in Yemen where US troops were lodged en route to Somalia. No US personnel were harmed, but two tourists were killed.¹⁹ In 1993, bombs exploded in the World Trade Center parking lot, killing six people and injuring a thousand. Six conspirators associated with al-Qaeda were captured, convicted and imprisoned. In 1996, Hezbollah operatives bombed the Kobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which housed foreign military personnel. Nineteen USAF servicemen were killed and nearly 500 persons from various nations were injured.²⁰ In August 1998, al-Qaeda bombed US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing more than 200 people and injuring more than 5,000 others.²¹

Society

Terror on the home front

As chilling as international acts of terror seem from a post-9/11 perspective, during the 1990s, terror on the home front garnered even more attention. Domestic terrorism included the 1996 bombing of the summer Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, resulting in one death and over a hundred injuries. In 1997, two subsequent bombings in the Atlanta area (of an abortion clinic and a lesbian nightclub) led to the arrest and conviction of Eric Robert Rudolph for all three bombings. In 1995, the ‘Unabomber’, Theodore Kaczynski, was convicted and sentenced to eight life sentences; his mail bombs, delivered between 1978 and 1995, had killed three and injured eleven. In 1992, a stand-off between federal agents and anti-government separatist Randy Weaver (wanted on a weapons charge) in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, resulted in the deaths of Weaver’s wife and son and a deputy US marshal. In 1993, a bloodier encounter between federal agents and an anti-government religious group called Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, resulted in the loss of nearly ninety lives. Heated debate surrounded these tragic events; some blamed the Davidians as a ‘doomsday cult’ bent on self-destruction; others considered Waco and Ruby Ridge unwarranted abuses of federal power.

Among the tragic consequences of these events was the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, masterminded by Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh in retaliation for what he perceived as federal abuse of power. The blast killed 168 people, including nineteen children, and injured nearly 700 others. The destruction also included more than $600 million in damage. McVeigh was convicted of murder and conspiracy in 1997 and executed in 2001. His partner Terry Nichols was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole.²²

The decade of shocking acts of domestic terror was brought to a heartbreaking conclusion with the deadliest high school shooting in US history.²³ In April 1999, two teenage boys, seniors at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, shot and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Biographical Note and Notes on Contributors
• General Preface Julia Listengarten and Brenda Murphy
• 1. Introduction to the 1990s Cheryl Black
• 2. American Theatre in the 1990s Sharon Friedman
• 3. Terrence McNally John M. Clum
• 4. Paula Vogel Joanna Mansbridge
• 5. Tony Kushner James Fisher
• 6. Suzan-Lori Parks Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr
• Afterword Cheryl Black and Sharon Friedman
• Documents
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright