Edward Albee calls his work "an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen

Absurd, Deconstructive, Minimal, Neurotic, Off-broadway, Open-ended, Social protest, Theater of the absurd

America's premier poet of twentieth-century theater dominated the stage for almost 20 years. Despite his fall into ignominy and artistic disfavor in the final years of his career, Tennessee Williams is still considered one of the world's finest dramatists. Together with Arthur Miller, Williams pionee

Agitated, Anxiety, Death, Homoerotic, Melancholy, Neurotic, Off-broadway, Post-war theater, Sexy, Southern gothic

Born Konstantin Sergeyevich Alekseyev in Moscow, actor, director, and producer Konstantin Stanislavski was nothing less than the father of modern acting theory. His theories facilitated the evolution of theatrical performance from hyperventilating melodrama to realistic depictions of human behavior.

Psychological, Realist theater

"I salute Antonin Artaud," wrote Andre Breton, "for his passionate, heroic negation of everything that causes us to be dead while alive." The French actor, director, poet, and theorist was an enraged man of arguable genius; nevertheless, his writings are seminal influences on experimental theater. Ar

Absurd, Experimental, Literature of transgression, Severe, Surreal, Surrealist theater, Theater of cruelty, Theater of the absurd