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Paul Green was an American playwright known for his moralistic realism and expressionism. His work often dealt with segregation and racism, notably in his Pulitzer Prize-winning play In Abraham’s Bosom. He later experimented with symphonic drama, a form of historical drama that incorporated poetry, pantomime, and music. Green was an advocate for racial equality and idealistic themes, inspiring modern historical dramas.
Paul Green is an American playwright best known for his 1927 play In Abraham’s Bosom. Throughout his life and career, Paul Green has ranged in style from straightforward moralistic realism to esoteric expressionism. While not often produced in the modern age, Green remains one of the most influential American playwrights, especially in the area of early Expressionism.
Green’s work is largely characterized by moral lessons, mostly revolving around segregation and racism. In Abraham’s Bosom deals with a North Carolina man of African American descent and his problems in improving the lives of those around him. It was seen as a surprisingly stark look at the plight of African Americans in the South during the 1920s, and quickly earned it high praise, as well as a Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
In the late 1920s, Paul Green traveled to Europe and was greatly influenced by the newly created forms of theater. He was especially drawn to Brecht’s epic theater and began to experiment with expressionism in his own work. He rejected Broadway, seeing New York as too commercial to produce truly meaningful theater, and his later plays, such as Shroud My Body Down and Tread the Green Grass were performed in his hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but never in New York City.
Later in life, Paul Green created a new form of theater, which he called the symphonic drama. Symphonic drama was a particular type of historical drama, usually performed at or near the location. Symphony plays were often produced as open-air plays and often made heavy use of grandiose sets and costumes, and music. The new form shared much with classical Greek theatre, incorporating poetic dialogue, pantomime and dance, while retelling historical stories. America is often said to have given the world two forms of drama: musical drama and symphonic drama.
In the mid-1930s Paul Green returned to New York, bringing with him a musical, Johnny Johnson, which was a pacifist morality play. It was directed by Lee Strasberg and was hailed as brilliant or useless by various reviewers. The play was written in three different genre styles, with the acts shifting from comic to tragic to satirical and the style shifting from realism to expressionism to absurdist.
Paul Green is generally regarded as one of the great promoters of the great Southern artistic tradition at a time when it was undergoing some confusion. He was a staunch advocate of racial equality at a time when many of his peers rejected such thoughts and fought for the idea of the southern gentleman writer. He was an idealist to the core and his plays deal with many idealistic themes, from pacifism in the face of war to the idea of redemption even for those whom society often finds irredeemable. Though most people have long since forgotten Paul Green, his legacy lives on in more modern historical dramas that echo his symphonic dramas, produced across the country and inspiring millions.
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