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Modern Us Drama Midterm Paper

Best Essays
Mary Hannah Dober
Modern US Drama Midterm Paper
March 30, 2015
Fucked:
Glengarry Glen Ross in 1984, 1992, 2005 and 2012.

The year is 1984. Ronald Reagan has just been re-elected by a landslide, including many votes from disaffected liberals. Yuppie culture fuels a high consumption economy. Tom Brokaw is now sole anchor of NBC’s Nightly News. Michael Jackson dominates the Grammys. McDonald’s debuts the McNugget. And Glengarry Glen Ross opens on Broadway. Because Glengarry Glen Ross is so inherently American, it’s hard to believe that it actually didn’t premiere in the United States, but at the National Theatre in London, to wildly successful reviews, before moving to Broadway the following year, where it ran for eleven months, and won the Pulitzer Prize.
Glengarry Glen Ross gave an unforgiving, yet comedic examination of American identity in the 1980’s, when capitalism was an all powerful force under Reagan’, and America was experiencing a new upsurge of consumerism. Still under the threat of the Cold War, American patriotism was loyal to the capitalist model and glorified American ideal of hard work, and individual success of man. The second wave of feminism which flowed through the seventies was ebbing, as waves do, and the newly invigorated desire to achieve success sharpened the gender binary of American culture.
Glengarry Glen Ross explores the harsh binary systems male vs. female and win vs. lose which are linked with the psychosexual binary of dominance vs.
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