American Century - Part 1

American Century Part I is a non-linear musical in which the Irondale Ensemble explores original songs, music, and a variety of acting styles to examine art and culture during the emergence of the United States as a world power; straddling the events and impacts of the Great Depression, World War II and its social and political outcomes, The Civil Rights Movement, McCarthyism, and the progression of liberalism during the 20th century.

Using seven key great American plays as source material, the evening-length work is a cross between an open rehearsal and an in-depth investigation into how theater was influenced by world events and how the writing styles of seven great playwrights created what we now call the American Theater.

The plays: The Verge by Susan Glaspell (1921), The Front Page by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (1928), Machinal by Sophie Treadwell (1928), A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (1947), The Crucible by Arthur Miller (1953), Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill (1956), and A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine-Hansberry (1959).

The journey through these works and their central lessons amplify the growth of American theater and the evolution of American social and political culture, from vaudeville to the dressed-up melodramas, to an era that is seen as one of the greatest in the three thousand years of western theater making. The Irondale ensemble composes its own origin story of how this period of time has influenced how we see the world today and experience the theatre of today, without apology or retreat.

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"If the theater doesn’t grow up, the American public doesn’t grow up either,” he wrote. “Instead, it gets hotted up, every 20 years or so, over the same issues — sex, politics and religion — the three matters that art, according to some strangely permanent lunatic fringe of American opinion, must never be allowed to deal with, at least not in any open manner." – Neil Genzingler

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