Messiah of the New Technique : John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 1923-1937

ISBN-13: 9780809326990 / Angielski / Twarda / 2006 / 296 str.

Jonathan L. Chambers

Opis

Messiah of the New Technique: John Howard Lawson, Communism, and American Theatre, 19231937 is a critical and political biography and a cultural and social history that focuses on Lawson s career in the theatre. Using a materialist methodology, Jonathan L. Chambers emphasizes the evolution and interplay of the playwright s artistic vision and political ideology, considering his art as both a documentation of this evolution and a product of the socio-political and cultural matrix in which he was immersed.Spanning the playwright s career, the volume details Lawson s early indoctrination in and commitment to the avant-garde, his use and development of various nonrealistic playwriting techniques, his subtle though unfocused attacks on bourgeois society, and the varied critical responses he received. Chambers addresses Lawson s involvement with the New Playwrights Theatre and his participation in the protests surrounding the case of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, which stimulated his growing commitment to left-wing politics and radical causes.Chambers also analyzes the social and cultural factors that shaped Lawson s growing interest in revolutionary politics, his tutelage in Marxism under Edmund Wilson, and his tenure as president of the Screen Writers Guild. He also covers the final phase of Lawson s playwriting career, which reveals the playwright s internal struggle. That struggle, suggests Chambers, pitted Lawson s view of aesthetics against his political ideology and is reflected in his scripts and theoretical writings.Messiah of the New Technique provides a wealth of new material about both the playwright and the period, offering a critical synopsis of the artist s career, addressing his often vehement rebuttals to his critics, and summarizing both his political activism and his creative and critical endeavors in the last forty years of his life."