Today there were
protests all across the United States in support of immigrants, so I wanted to
blog about some of the great American dramatists who were immigrants:
Dion Boucicault - Born in Ireland, Dion Boucicault moved to
England where he rose to fame with his play London Assurance, which Madame Vestris produced at Covent Garden. After a string
of hits in London, he moved to New York, where he conquered Broadway with his
melodrama The Poor of New York. The
play was actual adapted from a French work, but Boucicault went on to write the
quintessentially American play The
Octoroon, which Branden Jacobs-Jenkins recently adapted for the 21st
century. Boucicault is perhaps the first truly great American playwright. (Though
you could argue for the French-born Anna Cora Mowatt.) And, of course, he was
an immigrant.
Kurt Weill - Don't you love "Mack the
Knife," "September Song," and "The Saga of Jenny"? All
of those hit Broadway songs were written by the German immigrant Kurt Weill.
"Mack the Knife" of course came from The Threepenny Opera, which Weill originally wrote in Berlin with
Bertolt Brecht and Elizabeth Hauptmann. Being as he was a gay Jewish leftist,
Weill had to flee Hitler's Germany, first to Paris, then London, and eventually New York. That's
where he collaborated with Maxwell Anderson on Knickerbocker Holiday, which gave us the jazz standard
"September Song." "The Saga of Jenny" comes from Lady in the Dark, and featured lyrics by
the all-American Ira Gershwin, who was--incidentally--the son of immigrants.
Maria Irene Fornes - Born in Cuba, Maria Irene Fornes moved to New York
in the 1950s. Her play Fefu and Her
Friends has become a modern classic. I've always been a fan of her brutal one-act
play The Conduct of Life, and spoke
about it when she received the 2015 Edwin Booth Award. Recently, the Signature
Theatre produced her short play Drowning,
which reimagined a story by Anton Chekhov, but was told from the point of view
of aliens from outer space. Fornes wasn't from outer space, but she was once an
alien to this country, before become one of America's great playwrights of the
20th century.
Nilo Cruz - Speaking of Cuban-American
playwrights, Nilo Cruz, who won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for his drama Anna in the Tropics, was born in
Matanzas in Cuba, but immigrated to Miami as a child when his parents fled
communism. Cruz's play Sotto Voce
tells the story of a woman mourning the failure of both Cuba and the United
States to take in Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. As a former refugee
himself, Cruz certainly knows the importance of showing compassion to those who
arrive on your borders.
Martyna Majok - And who won the most recent Pulitzer Prize
for drama? That would be Polish-born playwright Martyna Majok. I haven't seen The Cost of Living, which garnered her
the award, but her play Ironbound is
wonderful, and deals quite poignantly with coming of age in urban America.
