Through an examination of plays, actors, reviews, and audience response of the period, this study traces the development of Broadway as a source of 'mature' American drama, and the simultaneous development of Professional-Managerial Class consciousness and habitus.

"This book represents an interesting project: one that is certainly worthy of study and important to share with the scholarly community. The heart of the book examines a number of plays that are . . .very important to the development of Broadway as we know it, and more to the point of this study, important to American cultural and economic development as reflected in the theatre of the time." - Ronald Wainscott, Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Theatre and Drama, Indiana University

"[T]he clear, cogent examinations prove their worth as case studies. Schwartz finds in these plays such variations on the professional-managerial character type as the neurasthenic, the college grind, and the can-do businessman. Recommended." - CHOICE

"[A] valuable and overdue study presenting a vision of theatre history rarely examined." - Broadside

"Schwartz turns anew to the Broadway plays on the boards, demonstrating how the three PMC character types were sometimes stark, sometimes subtle reflections of the tastes, fears, bigotries, convictions and even confusions of the genteel Broadway audience. The plays and playwrights tumble forth . . . a particularly insightful glance into the American musical" - The Clyde Fitch Report

Autorentext

Michael Schwartz is Temporary Assistant Professor of Theatre at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, USA.

Inhalt

1. To Stop the World: The Most Stupendous Impossibles 2. Where Do I Get Off At? The Wobblies Spurns the Hairy Ape 3. No Kick Coming: The Romantic Wobbly of Sidney Howard's They Knew What They Wanted 4. Jazzing the Wobblies: John Howard Lawson's Processionals 5. Dead Hand of the Dead: Anderson and Hickerson's Gods of the Lightning 6. "We Even Sing 'em in Jap and Chink": Upton Sinclair's Workers' Theater Contribution 7. You I-Won't Work Harp: I.W.W. Elegy in The Iceman Cometh 8. Postscript: Not Time Yet