The American Dream in American Gothic: The Plays of Sam Shepard and Adrienne Kennedy

Abstract

If the drama in the text, as we are always told, is to be realized on the stage, even on the stage there is something unrealized in American drama. Whatever the cause in our disheartening theater, there is a certain improvidence in our social history. From his earliest plays to his last, it troubled the imagination of Eugene O'Neill, still by sheer ambition our greatest playwright. He put the case against America when he was canonized by Henry Luce on the cover of TIME, which — right after World War II, from which we emerged as a superpower — was announcing the imperium of the American dream. On the contrary, said O'Neill, this nation is the greatest failure because it has betrayed the greatest promise. He put the case against himself in the enormous pathos of Long Day's Journey Into Night, which almost transcends the limitations by the exhaustiveness of their confession, the obsessive massing of the desire to have it all out.