American plays lent opportunity for great acting roles and dramatic realism, but we’ve recently overlooked their capacity for comedy and farce
BRITISH theatre has long enjoyed a love affair with America. You have only to look at the current London listings, where close to 20 shows originate from the USA. A large number of them are musicals, including the blockbuster Hamilton at the Victoria Palace and the parodic Spamilton at the Menier Chocolate Factory, but there are plenty of plays around: Tracy Letts’s blackly comic Killer Joe is just closing at the Trafalgar Studios as Jordan Seavey’s provocatively entitled Homos, Or Everyone In America opens at the Finborough.
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