The longer one looks at the list of great 20th-century playwrights, the clearer it becomes who the father of modern theater is.
Sigmund Freud.
Henrik Ibsen preceded him, but it's Freud who unlocked the door to the unconscious, and every major playwright of the 20th century walked right in to explore our dreams, our identity (or lack of same), our family dysfunctions, our concept of civilization and its discontents, even our belief that there will be a Godot to answer our prayers.
Twentieth-century drama can be divided into two camps that aren't as mutually exclusive as their strictest adherents like to believe: The theater of dreams and the theater of reality. Freud's influence is most apparent in the theater of dreams, from August Strindberg's ''The Dream Play'' to Robert Wilson's multimedia, nonlinear epics like ''the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it's down.'' As Robert Brustein - the artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre and one of the foremost champions of a less naturalistic theater - said in a Globe interview, ''My aesthetic has to do with plays that do touch on the dream life in some way and that don't leave us alone after they're over. They follow us home and invade our dreams, invade our sleep and haunt us, and I don't think the more intellectual, witty dramatists do that.''
The 20th-century dreamscapes would take any number of forms - expressionism, absurdism, surrealism. Italy's Luigi Pirandello would question the very nature of reality in 1921's ''Six Characters in Search of an Author,'' while France's Eugene Ionesco would turn reality on its head in ''The Chairs'' (1921) and ''Rhinoceros'' (1960). In all these plays the audience is asked to watch characters whose ego is stripped bare. The more the nature of identity is explored the less there is of it. But it was Samuel Beckett's ''Waiting for Godot'' in 1955, set in a postnuclear anytime, that raised the most depressing question: What if we are here alone in a universe without meaning, every quest we undertake a fool's errand, every hope we have an illusion? Beckett's influence would be pervasive: Variants of Vladimir and Estragon from ''Godot'' could be found in the works of such disparate playwrights as Harold Pinter, Athol Fugard, David Mamet, and Tom Stoppard.
Ironically, though, Beckett (like many other playwrights like him) doesn't work unless the director captures his almost slapstick humor. Otherwise he can be as boring as someone holding a placard warning that the end is nigh. If Beckett took language in the theater as far as it could go before becoming meaningless, schools of directors arose who believed the language was not necessarily the most important element of a theater production. Set design, movement, lighting, costumes, music, were equally and - in the case of the ultimate auteur director, Robert Wilson - even more important. Narrative broke down altogether in a deconstructed world where an individual's experience of, say, Wilson's adaptation of ''When We Dead Awaken'' was just as valid as Wilson's and far more valid than Ibsen's.
Equally Freudian
Even in the best of circumstances, Beckett and his fellow surrealists aren't exactly boffo box office, which raises the question of whether they should be. Were the days when serious plays - like those by Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams - appeared on Broadway an aberration?
These playwrights followed in the more naturalistic traditions of Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, and Anton Chekhov. But are these playwrights any less Freudian than their expressionistic brethren? The secrets that people within and without families suppress are bursting off their pages, with often tragic results. Ibsen, Shaw, and Miller were more interested than Strindberg, Chekhov, and Williams in the political world around them, but if they were not so adept at finding psychological dimensions to their political revolt their work would not be any better than the agitprop that limits lesser political playwrights.
Miller was actually after a less naturalistic mode of theater himself, but not one that left the theatergoer scratching his or her head. He wrote a blistering attack on abstractionism and its critical champions in Harper's magazine last year. While noting how tough it is to mount a serious play of any kind on Broadway, he railed against the trend of dismissing any work that is accessible to audiences. ''Realism is now a put-down; poetic is praise. Experimental is attractive; traditional is not. Metaphorical is intriguing, though perhaps not so much as lyrical, non-linear, dreamlike, and surreal. It is almost as if realism can hardly be poetic, or as if the poetic is not, at its best, more real then the merely realistic and, at its worst, more conventional beneath its elusive or unfathomable skin.''
Naturalism and accessibility, certainly, are no barrier to a searing theatrical experience, as evidenced by last year's revivals of Eugene O'Neill's ''The Iceman Cometh'' and Miller's ''Death of a Salesman.'' O'Neill actually predates Beckett's concerns about living one's life in an illusion of meaningfulness. It may be stretching things to call ''The Iceman Cometh'' accessible, but audiences don't need a road map to see where O'Neill was going.
O'Neill was the godfather of American drama, and one can see the distorted family dynamics, the Freudian rebellion against parents, informing the plays of Miller, Williams, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, August Wilson, and Christopher Durang. They would have stumbled across family dysfunction with or without O'Neill, or Freud for that matter, but O'Neill - himself reaching back to Strindberg - set the standards for the debate.
Shaw, similarly, has been the gold standard in England and Ireland, both for the theater of ideas (Stoppard, John Osborne) and for the comedy of manners (Noel Coward, Alan Ayckbourn). He and Anton Chekhov are the most-often-produced serious playwrights in England and the United States because they still manage to startle us with the psychological acuity of their characters, along with a profound parsing of the social situations in which they find themselves. In the right hands their plays are as modern as Stoppard's.
An alternative reality
We analyze our dreams, of course, to better appreciate our waking consciousness. To enter the theater in the first place is to seek an altered consciousness. The difference between the two schools, then, is not as great as it might seem. The protagonists of ''Death of a Salesman'' and Williams's ''The Glass Menagerie'' are lost in their dreams, or memories, which are almost the same thing in their cases. O'Neill's experiments in expressionism, like ''The Hairy Ape,'' are produced so rarely that one might forget them were it not for troupes like the Wooster Group. He tended not to mix the two, but Nobel Prize winner Wole Soyinka is known for doing just that, as is Bertolt Brecht.
On the other hand, some of the most memorable productions at the ART have mixed the naturalism of Shaw, Chekhov, O'Neill, and Ibsen with an attempt at bringing their psychological interiors to the surface through expressionistic and other means. And a good part of the allure of musical theater is the strange mix of naturalistic action interrupted by breaking out into song, although that form is at a crossroads. Developed by Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and the Gershwins, and fine-tuned by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, it has devolved into a situation of outright commercialism on the one hand and overartiness on the other. A tune-challenged legion of Stephen Sondheim wannabes have been unable to match his quasi-operatic successes; in general, Sondheim's influence has probably been a negative, despite his brilliance. There is still something special about a great musical, though, and perhaps ''Ragtime'' and Julie Taymor's contributions to ''The Lion King'' point a way to giving voice to both our dreams and reality. Considering, however, that Livent, the company that made ''Ragtime,'' went bankrupt, we may never see as good a musical again anytime soon.
As for the straight play, at the end of the century there still seems to be a split between the verbal pyrotechnics of August Wilson and Tom Stoppard (playwrights not so coincidentally championed by the Huntington Theatre Company) and the more kinetic theater of auteur directors like Robert Wilson and Andrei Serban. It seems less important to declare a winner than to hope for a vigorous competitiocompetition.
