Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
»
The Walking Dead: Survivors of the apocalypse must fight off zombies in Atlanta
and northern Georgia.
»
The Wire: Politicians versus police versus drug dealers on the mean streets of
Baltimore.
Theater
Eugene O'Neill put American drama on the map with his trilogy
Mourning Becomes
Electra
(1931), which sets a tragic Greek myth in post-Civil War New England. O'Neill
was the first major US playwright, and is still widely considered to be the best.
After WWII two playwrights dominated the stage: Arthur Miller, who famously mar-
ried Marilyn Monroe and wrote about everything from middle-class male disillusionment
(
Death of a Salesman,
1949) to the mob mentality of the Salem witch trials (
The Cru-
cible,
1953); and Tennessee Williams, whose explosive works
The Glass Menagerie
(1945),
A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947) and
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
(1955) dug deep in-
to the Southern psyche.
Edward Albee gave the 1960s a healthy dose of absurdism, and David Mamet and
Sam Shepard filled the '70s and '80s with rough-and-tough guys. These days Pulitzer Pr-
ize-winner Tracy Letts writes family dramas that are often compared to O'Neill, bring-
ing the scene full circle.
Broadway is where shows get star treatment. The famed NYC district earns more than
a billion dollars in revenue from ticket sales each year, with top shows pulling in a cool
$2 million a week. Long-running classics such as
The Lion King
and
Wicked
continue to
play before sold-out houses, while musicals such as
Les Miserables
get revamped and re-
open to much fanfare (as in 2014). But it's away from Broadway's bright lights, in re-
gional theaters such as Chicago's Steppenwolf, Minneapolis' Guthrie and hundreds
more, where new plays and playwrights emerge that keep the art vital.
Painting
In the wake of WWII, the USA developed its first truly original school of art: abstract
expressionism. New York painters Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko and oth-
ers explored freely created, nonrepresentational forms. Pollock, for example, made drip
paintings by pouring and splattering pigments over large canvases.
Pop art followed, where artists drew inspiration from bright, cartoony consumer im-
ages; Andy Warhol was the king (or Pope of Pop, as he's sometimes called). Minimalism
came next, and by the 1980s and '90s, the canvas was wide open - any and all styles
