Previously published as The American Dream Conspiracy: Cultural Critique in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in Conspiracy and Consent, International Perspective Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee (PULM 2017) Montpellier & Milano. Cover art: anonymous graffiti artist working in American Canyon Ruins.
1. Promises of the American Dream
Once, in a forgotten time in American history, the U.S. government funded the arts, valued its writers and artists and dramatists, and allowed radical theaters like The Group to flourish, and even, with difficulty, to bring forth pro-labor union plays. The Group Theater produced Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty in 1936, featuring the common worker and the labor union as its hero. Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater produced Marc Blitzstein’s pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock in 1937—under Franklin Roosevelt’s WPA. Today, any suggestion of government support for the arts in the U.S. meets with challenge and scorn. The Group Theater’s production of Odets’ agit-prop union drama, pitting ordinary workers against corporate and industrial wealth, fulfills Brecht’s ideal of the drama, inspiring its audience, as does Blitzstein’s musical. Odets and Blitzstein produced calls to action in the 30s.
Odets includes his audience as part of the union meeting that frames the play, with flashbacks to the lives of embattled workers. Blitzstein similarly melded performers with the audience at the first performance of Cradle, depicted in the 1999 Tim Robbins’ movie The Cradle Will Rock. With Brechtean audacity, Odets treats us to the stories of starved and harassed Depression-era workers, keeping the audience waiting for news from their—and our— absent leader, aptly named “Lefty.” Of course, Lefty, like Beckett’s Godot in Waiting for Godot (1958), never shows up. Instead, is beaten by company goons and left in the gutter. However, Lefty’s fate angers and energizes the union members, and the audience—encouraging them to take to the streets, to strike and organize, to act in common cause with “the common man.” Though the message may be obvious, and the workers’ stories sentimental, Odets’ dramatic picture of workers waiting for a savior to deliver them from the conspiracies of their bosses, from corrupt politicians and corporations, became a central idea of the Depression era theater. In our time, the 30s New Deal WPA programs for the arts have given way to new fears and conspiracies: we are still waiting for Lefty.
In the post-war period, Waiting for Lefty leaves the stage to Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in 1949, and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1961. These three well-known plays, were made into strikingly successful films with major stars. Hundreds of local and national productions were mounted, bracketing the 50s, depicting a decade that has been called the Dark Ages of American life.[1]
Of course, many other plays appeared during 50s—many famous U.S. musicals, for example, that camouflage the overwhelming odds lined up against the tragic and beaten characters epitomized in these three iconic plays. The most important musicals include South Pacific, Call Me Madam, Guys and Dolls, The King and I, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Camelot. These powerhouse musicals use romance and happy endings, celebrate individual love and the global reach of empire. Even when addressing serious racial, class, and political questions, they romanticize a time of American triumph and imperial conquest, spreading U.S. hyper-individualism globally. These musicals often assert U.S. “exceptionalism” with a “made in Hollywood” ending. Sentimentality and escapism were abroad in the land and exported widely, and only a few voices dared present a contrarian view of the lives of working men and women—to examine the forces that conspired against them and forced their consent to a system and way of life dictating conformity and alienation. In the 1950s, popular Broadway characters are thrown onto the horns of personal dilemmas, rather than political or social problems, encouraging them to look inward, rarely beyond the domestic hearth.
When I grew up in the 1950s in a working class ghetto in Chicago, we lived in the hopes of achieving the American Dream, of devoting ourselves to a job in order to rise into a “better” life. Like Stanley Kowalski in Williams’ play, like Willy Loman in Miller’s play, and like George and Martha in Albee’s play, we believed that labor, dedication, loyalty, and “higher” learning would lead up and out of lingering oppression and depression. Scholarships were available on a merit basis, and the state universities were free—facts unknown to youth today.
In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee’s George and Martha, a history professor and his upwardly striving wife, live and work in New Carthage, a college town ironically named after the great competitor of the Roman Empire. Although they live in the supposedly liberal collegiate enclave, they cannot escape the trappings of the American Empire. Here, in suburban comfort, they seem free from the urban ghetto, competing ethnic groups, and the threat of poverty. George and Martha represent the hopes of the Kowalskis and the Lomans because Albee’s middle class characters have escaped the workers’ world of the 1950s; George and Martha are educated, articulate, middle class successes. However, they still lack the essentials for life that the 1950s generation was seeking. In their suburban “bliss” and bitterness, they dwell in the lies and delusions of a dubious private center of learning, at the heart of the expanding U.S. empire.
2. The Stages of Dreaming: 1947 to 1962
These plays show the U.S. in three stages of social development: first, Stanley, Stella, and Blanche, the workers, live in urban squalor, fighting for family and love. Second, Willy and Linda, one rung up, pursue work and security and love. Third, George and Martha, middle class successes, struggle for self-acceptance. George and Martha lack involvement and creativity in the life beyond New Carthage. Did the fat years of the 1950s, with its rules and regulations, offer any progress, achieve any goals, for the worker; or did he / she remain stagnant and trapped like George and Martha? In these three plays we see the swift deconstruction of the communities of artists and workers, unions and intellectuals, which had begun in the 1930s. The New Deal was already being challenged by a corporatist spirit, and new economic forces were re-shaping America. When Eisenhower was elected in 1952, the old New Deal coalition came under siege: the values of community and cooperation were being by isolation and fear, underlined by Ike’s tolerance of McCarthyism and the weapons the U.S. had unleashed on the world. Each day at school, we ritually pledged our “Allegiance” to the flag, daily renewing our Loyalty Oaths. We were convinced that depression and war would not come again, if we remained compliant and obedient workers—and of course, consumers.
The two seminal plays of the late 1940s—Williams’ Streetcar and Miller’s Salesman—put forth the “common man” and “common woman” as heroes who are baffled by the new era emerging around them. They are tied to old values and mythic versions of the so-called American Dream, living in personal fantasy worlds. Stanley, Blanche, Willy, Happy, and Biff are bedeviled by “false consciousness,” living in myths that will sooner or later destroy them. In their acquiescence to the American nightmare of self-righteous conformity, Willy Loman and Linda, Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski, and even pregnant, abused Stella, all adopt an alien ethic designed to destroy or enslave. We are driven to ask, with Thomas Frank: What’s the Matter with Kansas?[2] Why do Kansans and other “conservatives” vote against their own interests? For these plays and these characters, we must ask: Why do these workers, salesmen, and teachers join in their own disempowerment? Why do they consent to be part of the 50s conspiracies of exploitation, conformity, silence, and war?
A conspiracy of fear looms large in these plays: Stanley Kowalski’s fear of being usurped by Blanche DuBois’ outdated Southern fantasy, and Blanche’s fear of his animal energy; Willy Loman’s pervasive fear of losing his job, after working beyond his abilities and beyond his years; and George and Martha’s fear of the total meaninglessness that looms over them. Beginning with Stanley, we see a budding salesman who has consented—assertively, with masculine vigor—to play his role as huckster for the American Dream. Stanley has hitched his wagon to a star, like his wife—called Stella—with the passionate intensity of husband and lover. Stanley asserts his “superiority” among his poker-playing, beer-drinking buddies and the self-theatricalizing interloper, Blanche. The play’s working title, “The Poker Night,” indicates the setting that Tennessee Williams had chosen: a mélange of workers—Black, Mexican, Polish—immigrants, women, a bowling tournament, a poker game—to represent the shabby working class neighborhood in New Orleans, poor, run down and cramped. As Williams describes the scene in the opening stage directions: “The exterior of a two-story corner building on a street named Elysian Fields and runs between the L and N tracks and the river. The section is poor . . .”[3] In what amounts to a parody of the capitalist conspiracy that he imbibes and embodies, Stanley becomes a primal force of Nature, crying out for his mate and protecting his tiny lair in the heart of the French Quarter.
Indeed, the French Quarter of the 1940s emerges as a locus of poverty, violence, and exploitation, long before it was celebrated as New Orleans’ Mardi Gras tourist attraction and, in our time, surrounded by tons of mud. The conspirators in Washington and Louisiana provided no decent public works and levees to protect ordinary people from hurricane and corruption. Stanley works on, ignorant of his real enemies, living inside the belly of the beast, as the corporations refuse to protect him from the natural or economic disasters they are causing by inattention, neglect, and profit-taking. The corporate conspiracy against the Common Man, re-branded The Dream, demands his consent and conviction from the 1950s onwards. By consenting, we lose the dream of collective action, community projects, and common cause that once animated Stanley’s forbearers. Instead of “the melting pot,” they face isolation, pitting the Poles and French, Irish and Mexican, male and female against each other. As they circle the poker table at the center of Williams’ play, they embody the workers’ gamble on The Dream. The last words of the play, echoing the game of chance, are: “This game is seven card stud.”
Williams’ first title, “The Poker Night,” used the gambling metaphor to stand for the losing proposition in which they all engaged. Stanley and Blanche are doomed to lose, playing against tremendous odds. Even Mitch and Stella, the passive onlookers in “Streetcar,” submit to the destructive game. Williams’ versions of the common man and woman play against each other, but they are all losing to the house, attacking and debasing each other in the claustrophobic apartment complex. They symbolize the Old South pitted against industrial might, a crazy ride on a streetcar full of desires that lead them nowhere.
Christopher Bigsby says, “Blanche is deeply narcissistic in a narcissistic culture.”[4] Often seen as Williams’ heroine, representing aesthetic and female forces, she actually destroys herself by buying into the conspiracy of beauty, artifice, and myth. Her affairs with boys and her gay husband indicate her cruelty and confused sexuality. The myth encloses Blanche until she can no longer touch reality. Closed in by the Dream she has bought into, there’s nothing left but to “depend on the kindness of strangers”—a feudal throwback that cannot work in the land of Stanley. Crushed by the realities of Stanley’s industrial world, she invokes her own destruction. By using sexuality as the key event of the play, Williams is signaling his own marginalization, his own gay and rejected status, to his audience. Williams speaks from a position outside the accepted norms of his time, depicting a struggle between an idealized past and a brutal present. On the stage, Williams’ New Orleans plays its own death knell—“flores para los muertos.” We see Williams’ characters engaged in gambling, dreaming, and drinking, trapped in the destructive myth of the Dream turning to Nightmare.
Both Stanley and Willy Loman believe they have been cheated by the system under which they labor as factory worker and salesman. They are looking for someone to blame. Because Stanley believes he has been swindled by the South’s old French traditions, he detests Blanche who represents the artificial and fading Southern class structure. Blanche, who tries to seduce the newspaper boy, represents “high” art and corruption, while Stanley stands for efficient, modernized war and terror, to which the modern worker must consent. The constantly humiliated worker even turns against his wife and family, desperately attempting to maintain power. Stanley strikes Stella, Willy takes out his frustrations on Linda, and George is constantly goading Martha to greater heights of insult and injury. We see Willy Loman abusing his children and his wife, taking out his frustration on them. But Willy convulsively preaches the same old rules to his sons, as he succumbs to the corporate values of 1950s America.[5]
In 1949, two years after Williams’ play, Miller’s salesman hero, Willy Loman, has been tamed by corporate rules into a life of rote domesticity. Madness haunts Willy from the opening scene. He dreams aloud for us about his brother Ben, who went into the wilderness of Africa and found diamonds: “I walked into the jungle, I was seventeen. When I walked out I was twenty-one. And, by God, I was rich!”[6] Willy believes in that Old Conspiracy—the American Dream—like Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway before him. He believes that he can become part of the dream if only he serves it loyally and well, decade after decade. He believes that there is gold in “them thar hills,” and anyone—even he—can grasp it.
Willy’s sons, Happy and Biff, embody the painful split, the schizophrenia that grows from his disease. Happy, that most unhappy businessman, is trying to fulfill his father’s business dreams, but he is frustrated by a self-destructive urge—feeling that he has to conquer his boss’s fiancée in order to beat a corrupt system. Happy conspires to steal his boss’s life and labor. Knowing that he is the ultimate victim, Happy continues to believe in the system and takes out his frustrations on women and on himself. Biff, the hopeful and idealistic son who refuses to consent to the salesman’s fate, runs off to the wild west, to appreciate the fresh winds and the newly-born colts in the field. Biff is also thrown into panic by his father’s self-degradation, petty tyrannies, and domineering over the ever-faithful Linda. Biff is torn between the business ideals that conspire against his humanity and his desire to escape them. Will he also consent? We don’t know at the end, at Willy’s funeral, but we do know that he has begun to see the trap that was set for his father and the Low-Men. What is the conspiracy that Biff and later, George and Martha are trying to escape?
In the 1950s, capitalist believers conform instinctively to the demands of work, performance, and puritanical devotion. All three plays are based on the U.S. hyper-individualism which became the new credo. Despite their education and class mobility, George and Martha have been robbed of any sense of community or cooperation. What the worker has finally won is a hollow victory. They cannot replace what was sacrificed. Williams, Miller, and Albee expose the individualist “lie” at the heart of the American Dream. The common man in the United States was finally bereft of support, from the state and eventually, even the unions. The privatization of the social structure still wreaks havoc on the common man.
3. From Domestic Life to Imperial Conquest
These three plays, actually domestic dramas, are studies in the new American family. Willy, the quintessential salesman, lives “on a smile and a shoeshine.”[7] He struggles in the world of commercial capitalism, seeking the Holy Grail of security and glory. Willy lives in the past and is ignorant of the present, trapped by the Big Lie of capitalism—the security of a job, the idea of a pension, the retirement at the end. He believes in those tricky, elusive American promises that somehow never pan out. When inflation, crashes, bankruptcies, wars, and international conspiracies strike, the common man is forced to pay the bill. These “unexpected” events, like those that Naomi Klein discusses in The Shock Doctrine,[8]blow away the planning and promises once made to workers like Stanley and Blanche, Willy and Linda, George and Martha. The American Dream they have been sold turns into the American Nightmare, after years of consent and labor, on the part of the used-up worker and his/her family.
Albee’s George and Martha play out a domestic life that reflects the political crises and international marauding of U.S. imperialism, beginning with the Korean War. George, a failed history professor and a failed novelist, shares the fears felt by women, Blacks, Hispanics, and other marginalized groups in the 1950s. Stuck in his privatized kingdom, George concocts the story of a son they never had, adding the climax of that supposed son’s horrible death. What motivates a supposedly successful bourgeois couple to adopt the conspiratorial method as the crux of their lives? How does their conspiracy reflect the larger mysteries under which they live and suffer? Although the wars are not mentioned, the imagined death of their “son” symbolizes the fate of many sons.
What do George and Martha fear? They fear being barren, lacking expression, and wasting their lives. They fear losing security, being hurled out of the suburban bliss of New Carthage into hellish oblivion. Who put them in this middle-class prison, living well and living in hell at the same time? Is it Martha’s father, the president of the college who chose George for her? Is it the economic system that denied brilliant women like Martha equality and real work? Perhaps it is the academic conformity that demands “publish or perish.” George and Martha live in a prison, trying fitfully to escape their grim, monotonous existence. He is a teacher who cannot teach and a writer who cannot write. She is an ambitious wife who urges him onward and undercuts him at the same time. Albee shows that the U.S. middle class is on the move, but aimlessly, and at the service of forces beyond their control or knowledge.
At every turn the academic and the political system combine to demean George and Martha, to turn them into intellectual robots, serving up the same rotten beliefs to generations of students year after year. George and his exhibitionist, party-giving wife, Martha, also consent to train the next generation of faculty to do the same. They torture the young couple joining them for dinner and try to make them into reflections of themselves. Faced with the impossibility of inspiring a free and creative new generation of students and faculty, they collude to repeat their own disaster. They nurture another generation of obedient workers, victims of the same plan that destroyed their human potential. If, at the end, they are still afraid of Virginia Woolf, they express well-grounded fears of repeating Woolf’s despair and suicide in the face of war. Their own child, the fantasy son, is already dead—many times over.
What happened to the material comforts stemming from the post-WWII economic boom that are supposed to satisfy the middle-class characters in Albee’s play? Even Virginia Woolf, a member of the English elite, could no longer face the contradictions around her, the social class divisons of her day, and the wars raging in Europe in 1941. Although she had written about WWI in Mrs. Dalloway (1925), in that novel she reveals the conspiracy of “patriotism” that drives her character Septimus Warren Smith into the trenches and then to shell-shock, madness and suicide. She presents the class conspiracy that keeps Clarissa Dalloway in her privileged place, giving parties for the Prime Minister and her Tory M.P. husband, Richard, whom she serves valiantly as hostess and ornament. Woolf finally refused to participate again: in another war, another generation consenting to its own destruction. Woolf and Martha fight bouts of depression, like Blanche DuBois; but Woolf walks into the Wye River with stones in her pocket. Finally, in Albee’s play, Martha writes a note in lipstick on a bathroom mirror, challenging the intellectuals to figure out her riddle: “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Can any of these characters challenge her solution to the conspiracy they live under?
In the 1950s, the U.S. was an economic powerhouse thanks to its triumph in World War II. With an upwardly mobile population, runaway suburbanization, and rising incomes, we wonder what the problem might be. After all, workers like Willy Loman and Stanley Kowalski and Blanche DuBois ought to be doing just fine. Hyper-individualism is well on its way to banishing the need for community, cooperation, or communalism. These three Cs were on the run and the worker could sing about the glories of individualized “capitalism,” self-help, and the entrepreneurial spirit. The unmentioned “C word”—Conformity—works in the background to keep the common man in order, minding his P’s and Q’s, raising his children according to conformist rules, like Willy.
What motivates the workers in these plays of the 1950s? Are they concerned about increased wages or promotion, liberation from labor, wage-slavery, or the hope of a more creative life? No, what motivates them is the Holy Grail of the American Dream. Workers like Willy Loman had been sold this Dream, and they pursue it religiously. But the tangible wealth he once expected fails to appear. He has been fed empty promises. At some point his consent is overwhelmed by the Big Lie and nothing is left. Perhaps today the 99% has exposed the truth and are making their voices heard.
Like Willy Loman, Stanley Kowalski cannot swallow the many schemes of destruction in which he takes part. Even as he conspires to expose Blanche’s sexual secrets and her tawdry past, he becomes further enmeshed in the new industrial web. Stanley sees Blanches’ artifice, her pretense and pretentiousness, and destroys it. Two great theatrical wills—the assertive and the artistic, the practical and the poetic—collide. But in the end, of course, the pretentions of the ante-bellum South cannot hold, and Stanley emerges, by default, temporarily and hollowly, as a victor—joining the ranks of “The Hollow Men.”
Stanley and Willy, the protagonists of their plays, are degraded by their work and by the legal system. They find consenting victims, in wife and sister-in-law, in obedient colleagues, and in children. They become bullies like those who had abused them—torturing their own family until they consent to join in the false consciousness of the previous era and to join the very beliefs that are undoing them all. That’s why Kansas votes Republican—because we are used to being fooled; we follow the old rules which are presented as new ones, consenting time after time to play out the old lies.
A hero like Willy Loman has no way of correlating that dream with the painful workers’ realities that are consuming him—debt, mortgage, age, decline, the end of employment and income. He is being cast aside by the very people who exploited him and celebrated him as the common man. Miller’s Willy Lo-man, doing the dirty work of capitalism, face-to-face with selling on the road, tries to turn it into a way of life, an adventure, a noble quest. But he only succeeds in displaying to audiences his “false consciousness,” his inability to make reality fit the Dream. But are these characters psychological failures, or is there something outside of them conspiring against their success? Each of them is isolated in his or her little domestic universe, with no help coming from outside. There is no social support; there are neither unions nor communities in the world of Willy, Blanche, or Stanley, or in the isolated college town of George and Martha. All that is left is social carnage, only the hermetic and sealed world of the individual, facing his and her horrors, alone. The consumer on his own.
In the drama of the 1950s and 60s, the major playwrights—Williams, Miller, and Albee—are signaling desperately from the decks of a foundering ship. Their domestic dramas reflect the political life of the country in a conspiratorial house of mirrors—where family stands for country and domestic tragedy stands for international dominance. These three plays use family drama to get under the skin of the middle-class and college-educated and finally, high school audiences—to tell us that what we see on the stage reflects our country, our economy, and our foreign affairs. Is anyone listening?
We see the whole American drama spread out before us, desperate husbands and desperate housewives clinging to hyper-individualized, anti-government ideas, struggling to live in the false consciousness preached by the American conspiracy. What is the Dream but a conspiracy of corporate and military powers to keep the factories running, mostly abroad now and the armies supplied obedient cannon-fodder? The unemployed who once filled the factory floor, now serve on the battlefield, as Johnny comes marching home again—from Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Every day since World War II, there has been an American war or takeover or overthrow somewhere in the world.[9] The individualized dreams of our protagonists are projected onto the great screen of expansion and colonization, a new Imperial Manifest Destiny, declared by “W.”
Locked in their narrow domestic prisons, Willy Loman and Stanley and Blanche, and even George and Martha, embody the fear that is rampant in the land—the proto-fascism, the Red Scare, the long hours of labor, 9/11, and translate them into fear at home. The conspiracy of the American Dream—a lottery, a Wall-Street gamble, a Las Vegas shuffle—has enslaved people until they cannot trust what they see before their eyes. How did they sell the Old Lie in America? As Wilfred Owen has notes, citing Horace: Dulce et decorum est—pro patria mori”—”how sweet and fitting it is, to die for one’s country.” Are these characters as willing to submit to death, as they are to the corporate corruption and sleazy conspiracies that rule their lives? In addition to consenting to the inhumanity and economic inequity of their lives, do they also commit themselves to foreign conflicts and military adventures? Perhaps Stanley and Willy are still willing to devote themselves to any cause labeled patriotic. Is there a capitalist and imperial conspiracy nascent in these American characters? As their characters struggle with terrible conflicts between beliefs and actions, Williams and Miller expose the trap that has sprung on their characters.
Ben, Willy’s brother, successfully invades the jungles and wilds with intentions and actions that are far more coherent than those of Willy and his sons. Is his brother’s success merely a part of Willy’s delusion? Is Ben the successful entrepreneur on the world stage, or is he part of Willy’s fantasy American Dream? What deals did he concoct to get the wealth from far-off colonies, according to Willy? Maybe he is just another part of the fantasy that propels the American Dream, which twists historical evidence to prove its own claims. Maybe it’s the easy and glib triumphalism of characters in these plays—their assumption of the superiority of their beliefs that underlines the Ugly American of the 1950s?
Only George and Martha dare question their own assumptions, but at the cost of killing their own son, even if only in fantasy. By that imagined or real loss, they lose their real lives, their hold on reality, their own stream of consciousness so wisely depicted and then broken by Virginia Woolf herself. They have come to the end of their string, they have achieved petit bourgeois status, and in teaching and defending the corporate rules they follow, they destroy their hopes for a humane life. Who’s afraid of the sudden death in war—whatever war is raging now? Who’s afraid of impotence, death, hysteria, disease, eruptions of repressed emotions, the disloyal friends and family, competition between workers for the crumbs from the table? As Martha replies to George at the end of Albee’s play:
GEORGE: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf….
MARTHA: I … am … George … I … am…. [10]
Do audiences see the reproduction of hidden capitalist and imperial values in these domestic dramas? Do they see the multiple conspiracies that have led to our enslavement, the debasement, decadence, and corruption of our social values? How could we miss it? These playwrights are exposing the flaws of the empire right in front of us, as they are lived in the life of the “Common Man and Woman.” The playwrights are calling into question the formation of our consciousness and the forces that conspire to keep us enslaved. Williams, Miller, and Albee depict Every Person as he / she signs on the dotted line, consenting to the fine print in the unintelligible and deceptive social contract.
In an age before the triumph of the Business Major, Happy and Biff are already alienated by the demands of the corporate world. The demise of decency, social connections, and humanity gave rise to Occupy Wall Street. According to 50s business ethos, Stanley, Willy, George, and Martha must turn away from the terrors of the Atomic Age and look for their salvation in the Nuclear Family, so aptly named. Under the sway of McCarthyism, audiences were hypnotized and brainwashed by spectacles like the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The trial served up a warning against communism, loudly preached by all the newspapers. After all, as President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Defense, Charles Wilson said, “What is good for our country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.”[11] These playwrights vividly display the threatening conformity of daily life, which accepts and consents to oppression and abuse, racism, and misogyny. We witness the national shame in Blanche’s, Linda’s, and Martha’s physical and mental tortures. From the subjugation of women to the domination of the globe, we travel from the French Quarter to New Carthage—riding a wave of imperial arrogance.
The personal indeed becomes the political in these plays—corporate rules and laws conspire to form willing workers, like Willy and Linda, Stanley and Blanche, George and Martha. Since Frank has asked why Kansas votes against its own interests, we can answer that these salesmen, hucksters, cowboys, factory workers, teachers, loose women, sex workers, college history professors, and desperate drunken housewives all have become victims of a right-wing conspiracy, consenting to their own degradation. Far from profiting, these characters are victims of the economic system. American workers in these plays follow a familiar pattern of degradation, as they are whittled down to fit a mean, profit-driven, and individualistic concept of life in the U.S.—often misleadingly labeled “human nature.” But it’s a nature that exists only here. Any idea of common good or community is squelched in the death of the social sphere, the public forum, the public services, the free universities.
We are looking at the death of public life. It is the end of community in the United States in the 1950s. Blame the workers and the unions for the failures of General Motors—until it is too late, and then do it again. The corporations and banks are never at fault. The common man must be controlled, restricted, and celebrated at the same time—celebrated for his ability to consent to his own destruction. Why, after all, would it be so easy to trick consumers into buying and selling irrational debt, buying houses beyond their means, and swallowing the poison of derivatives?[12]
The idealized American family, bastion of US ideology, is itself a conspiracy commanding conformity to its rigid rules—reflecting the supposed meritocracy that was America, which was of course not really the case.[13] The war, the fear, the ideology of hyper-individualized achievement, and finally, the failure to live up to unrealistic commercialized ideals, involved the consent of Everyman and Everywoman. The whole culture was being groomed to become the loyal drones of conspiratorial capitalism—what could possibly go wrong? While the U.S. political system touted the power of the atomic bomb, claiming to save Korea and Vietnam from Communism, instead the US projected conspiracies abroad while hiding its own at home.[14]
Drama may be privately conceived, but it is publicly created. A very social art form, aware of its own conventions, drama highlights the extent to which social reality is pure theater. Loss of human dignity through the Great Depression underlies Williams’, Miller’s, and Albee’s views of the world. For them the integrity and practical viability of the social system had been thrown into question by the Great Depression, which did offer some remarkable solutions—now ignored and derided. In their plays, which bracket the “dark ages of the 1950s,” they reveal a conspiracy of oppression and manipulation–lurking behind a facade of consent.
1. Marty Jezer, The Dark Ages: Life in the United States, 1945-1960 (Boston: South End Press, 1982).
2. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2004).
3. Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire (New York: Signet-Penguin Group, 1947), 13.
4. Christopher W. E. Bigsby, Modern American Drama, 1945-2000 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48. Bigsby’s book offers insights into all three writers.
5. Richard Lichtman, “Death in Life: Reflections on Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman” (Unpublished essay, 2009), 25ff. In his essay, Lichtman brilliantly analyzes the role of individuality in Miller’s characters and its social meaning.
6. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York: Penguin Books, 1949), 52.
7. Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York: Penguin 1949), pg. 111.
8. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2008).
9. Andrew J. Bacevich. The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War and American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (New York: Oxford, 2005, 2013).
10. Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (New York: Signet-Penguin, 1962), 242.
11. William Pelfrey, Billy, Alfred, and General Motors (New York: Amacom, 2006), 277.
12. Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004). See Ch. 6, “Persecuted, Powerless, and Blind.”
13. Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York: Basic Books, 1993). See Ch. 6, “A Man’s Home is His Castle.”
14. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). See Ch. 20, “The Seventies: Under Control?”
Barry David Horwitz has been teaching and reviewing theater for many years–as well as acting and producing plays for The Quixotic Players. He has also acted and worked as Dramaturge with Shotgun Players of Berkeley. He tries to link theater to political and social movements, as he did for many years in English and Drama classes at Saint Mary’s College of California; University of California, Berkeley; and the Universities of Paris (Sorbonne/Sciences-Politiques) and Montpellier (Paul-Valery).
Barry has produced plays ranging from Greek classics to modern works, looking for the contemporary and the familiar in all works. He was the Artistic Director of The Quixotic Players for many years, and Director of Events at Saint Mary’s. Now retired, and a Member of the San Francisco Theater Critics’ Circle and a Theatre Bay Area Adjudicator, he writes about plays worth seeing and events worth thinking about in San Francisco and beyond.
He is now Founder and Editor of the theater review website Theatrius.com and can be reached at
reviews@theatrius.com
His article on three plays of the 1950s by Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee, titled “The American Dream Conspiracy,” is published in Conspiracy and Consent, Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée (PULM 2017).
