Modern American Drama on Screen

Focusing on key texts, leading scholars explore how Hollywood has given an enduring life to the classics of Broadway theater.

William Robert Bray (Edited by), R. Barton Palmer (Edited by)

9781316619681, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 1 September 2016

316 pages, 46 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.46 kg

From its beginnings, the American film industry has profited from bringing popular and acclaimed dramatic works to the screen. This is the first book to offer a comprehensive account, focusing on key texts, of how Hollywood has given a second and enduring life to such classics of the American theater as Long Day's Journey into Night, A Streetcar Named Desire and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Each chapter is written by a leading scholar and focuses on Broadway's most admired and popular productions. The book is ideally suited for classroom use and offers an otherwise unavailable introduction to a subject which is of great interest to students and scholars alike.

Introduction R. Barton Palmer and William Robert Bray
1. Realism, censorship, and social promise of Dead End Amanda Klein
2. Screening Our Town (1940): or the problem of 'looking at everything hard enough' David Eldridge
3. Screening Death of a Salesman: Arthur Miller's cinema and its discontents R. Barton Palmer
4. Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire William Robert Bray
5. Come back, little Scopophile: William Inge, Daniel Mann, and cinematic voyeurism John S. Bak
6. The Big Knife: Hollywood's 'fable about moral values and success' Christopher Ames
7. Adapting Lorraine Hansberry's sociological imagination: race, housing, and health in A Raisin in the Sun Martin Halliwell
8. The Children's Hour Neil Sinyard
9. Screening Long Day's Journey into Night Mary F. Brewer
10. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? David Lavery and Nancy McGuire Roche
11. Sex, lies, and independent film: realism and reality in Sam Shepard's Fool for Love Annette Saddik
12. Actor, image, action: Anthony Drazan's Hurlyburly (1998) Laurence Raw
13. David Mamet brings film to Oleanna Brenda Murphy
14. To what end Wit? John D. Sykes, Jr
15. Theatrical, cinematic, and domestic epic in Tony Kushner's Angels in America (on stage and screen) Tison Pugh
Filmography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB], Film, TV & radio [AP], Theatre studies [AN]