Synopses & Reviews
Mention southern drama at a cocktail party or in an American literalure survey, and you may hear cries for Stella or laments for gentleman callers. Yet southern drama depends on much more than a menagerie of highly strung spinsters and steel magnolias.
In The History of Southern Drama, Charles Watson explores this field from its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century roots through the Southern Literary Renaissance and Tennessee Williams's triumphs to the plays of Horton Foote, winner of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize. Watson links the work of the Charleston dramatists and of Espy Williams, first modern dramatist of the South, to later twentieth-century drama. Strong heroines in plays of the Confederacy foreshadow the spunk of Tennessee Williams's Amanda Wingfield. Claiming that Beth Henley matches the satirical brilliance of Eudora Welty anti Flannery O'Connor, Watson connects her zany humor to 1840s New Orleans farces.
Two chapters devoted to drama by southern blacks begin with slave-born William Wells Brown, author of two plays as Clotelle, the first novel by an African American. Watson recognizes the trail-blazing plays of Zora Neale Hurston and closely examines the extensive output of Randolph Edmonds, author of forty-seven plays as well as numerous essays on drama.