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Lillian Florence Hellman |
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Like many other playwrights of the 1930s, Lillian Hellman urged a social conscience on the theatre. By her own admission, she is a moralist who cannot avoid the final "summing up," with the sometimes too obvious explanatory speech at the end of act 3. Often in her plays the forces of good and evil are so clearly defined that a focus on wicked characters and violent, contrived action has encouraged the not-always-unjust charges of melodrama and sensationalism. Yet unlike many of her contemporaries--Odets, Rice, Kingsley--whose popularity declined after World War II when the theatre of social protest fell into disrepute, Hellman made the transition from a focus on issues to a concern for the personal morality of the individual. In fact, in her best plays, specific social and historical forces are left in the background. Though not a prolific writer, Hellman did experiment with other dramatic forms and subject matter; her canon includes anti-Fascist war plays, an operetta, a farce, and plays about the decaying Old South.
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