Contexts of American Plays - AP English Literature and Composition

A Streetcar Named Desire is one of Tennessee Williams’ most famous plays.

The play was first performed in 1947 on Broadway, and it received the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Tennessee Williams, the author of A Streetcar Named Desire, published The Glass Menagerie in 1945.

Prior Walter is a character from the play Angels in America, not from A Streetcar Named Desire.

Tony Kushner is the author of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which was more recently adapted into an HBO miniseries. The play is divided into two parts (which can be performed together or separately): Millennium Approaches and Perestroika.

The play premiered in 1991 and won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in Drama. If you didn’t know this, though, you could still infer that the play was performed in 1990s, as a central subject is the AIDS crisis that was just becoming widespread in America in the mid- to late-1980s.

Amanda Wingfield is a character in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, not Tony Kushner’s Angels in America.

Angels in America features doubling (one actor playing two or more roles), Biblical allusions and visitations from angels, monologues by several of the main characters, and hallucinatory visions. It does not include deus ex machina, which is a theatrical device whereby something unexpected and unexplained intervenes to fix a plot problem and drastically alter the course of the play. (A famous deus ex machina occurs in Hamlet in the form of the pirates.)

This author is Arthur Miller, an important American playwright and essayist. Miller is famous for being married to Marilyn Monroe and for testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee as well as for his significant contributions to American drama, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and various other honors.

The Violent Bear It Away is actually a novel by Flannery O’Connor and not a play at all. The other four works are all dramas written by Miller between 1937 and 1955.

Martha is a central character in Edward Albee’s 1962 play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and not in Miller’s Death of a Salesman.

This play not only premiered in but also won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1949. If you didn’t know this, you could still eliminate some of the answer choices if you knew that Arthur Miller wasn’t born until 1915.

Playwright Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) wrote A Raisin in the Sun (1959).Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America (1993). Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1966). August Wilson wrote Fences (1987). Adrienne Kennedy wrote A Lesson in Dead Language (1968). All of these authors are major award-winning, twentieth-century American playwrights.

Langston Hughes’ famous poem “Harlem” (also called “A Dream Deferred”) (1951) likens a delayed dream to a grape that withers into a raisin in the sun.

A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by an African-American playwright to debut on Broadway, and it did so in 1959.

The play is set in midcentury Chicago and reflects, among other social concerns of that (and this) time, racist housing policies. While the play was inspired by Langston Hughes' poem "Harlem" (1951), the play was definitively set in Chicago, and the connection to "Harlem" was based on a metaphorical image (of a grape withering in the sun).

American playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953) wrote Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), one of his most famous plays. Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman (1949). Tennessee Williams wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). Tony Kushner wrote Angels in America (1993). Henrik Ibsen (the only non-American in the answer options) wrote Hedda Gabler (1890).

Although it was written a decade earlier, the play did not debut until 1956. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957.

The play takes place over the course of a single day in the lives of a dysfunctional Connecticut family. Although the play is extremely lavish in its description of the setting, all of the action of the play is restricted to that one location.

Inspired by the works of realist playwrights such as Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a highly realist work of drama. The work, as it is realist, cannot also be surrealist. Postmodernism and post-structuralism are near synonyms, and are anachronous to O'Neil's play.