Expressionism In American Drama

Until the post-World War I era, American drama, confronted with religious hostility and then by economic necessity and academic indifference, struggled to come into its own as a respected literary genre at home and as a force that made itself felt on foreign stages. A commonplace of American literary history is that the plays of Eugene O’Neill, in Walter J. Meserve’s words, marked “America’s full-scale arrival into the modern drama of western civilization.”
In an article in a 1907 issue of Atlantic Monthly, John Corbin quoted Edmund Stedman, who proclaimed a literary declaration of independence for American drama: “Quote boldly, then, I prophesy the dawn of the American drama; and quite confidently, too, for the drama has already dawned.” Decrying

Expressionist playwrights tried to convey the dehumanizing aspects of 20th-century technological society through such devices as minimal scenery, telegraphic dialogue, talking machines, and characters portrayed as types rather than individuals. Notable playwrights who wrote expressionist dramas include Ernst Toller and Georg Kaiser (German), Karel Čapek (Czech), and Elmer Rice and Eugene O'Neill (American). The 20th cent. also saw the attempted revival of drama in verse, but although such writers as William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Christopher Fry, and Maxwell Anderson produced effective results, verse drama was no longer an important form in English. In Spanish, however, the poetic dramas of Federico García Lorca are placed among the great works of Spanish literature. Three vital figures of 20th-century drama are the American Eugene O'Neill, the German Bertolt Brecht, and the Italian Luigi Pirandello. O'Neill's body of plays in many forms—naturalistic, expressionist, symbolic, psychological—won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and the existentialist dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre, in the realistic and symbolic dramas of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Jean Anouilh, and in the surrealist plays of Jean Cocteau. Indicated the coming-of-age of American drama. Brecht wrote dramas of ideas, usually promulgating socialist or Marxist

The wachowski brothers allows the viewer to see how reality and illusion can be mistaken for the other, using a number of contrasting ideas found in Plato’s analogy of the cave, showing that at times the dream world can be safer than real life the matrix is a simulation that creates an imaginary world where people are prisoners from reality, much like Plato’s mythological the caves. the cave holds prisoners inside a dark cave, chained in way prohibiting them from turning their heads ,only able to see is a wall that displays images of what appears to be of people or animal passing behind them these reflections or images are all the prisoners know of the world outside cave. They see only what the marionette players want them to see projections of objects that are not real but seem real because they have never seen them the real world people in the matrix only see what the machines shadow, making it difficult to wake up from a continuous dream show, trapped in an illusion world unable to be