ABSTRACT
Musical comedy has often been called the only unique American contribution to the theatre. This claim is not merely oversimplified; it is false, or partly false, in two opposite directions. That musical comedy is not the only unique American contribution can be seen by a moment’s contemplation of the “living newspaper” technique of the 1930s, which may have originated in German expressionist devices, but possessed its own special manner of presentation; or the prose style and the whole conception of tempo and dynamics of such playwrights as Clifford Odets and Lillian Hellman, who capture a wholly American idiom and rhythm of expression; or the prose-poetry of Tennessee Williams, who has a completely American notion of what poetic values are and how they should function in the theatre; or the machinery of farce as revised by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, who devised for that métier an idiom as distinctly American as that of Odets and Miss Hellman in the serious drama.
