AP English Literature and Composition › Contexts of World Plays After 1925
Who of the following is not a Caribbean playwright?
Wole Solinka
Aimé Césaire
Derek Walcott
Kamau Brathwaite
Earl Lovelace
Wole Solinka is a dramatist, but he is from Nigeria, not the Caribbean. He is the first African recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his plays, which feature colonialism and African politics, include Death and the King’s Horsemen, Kongi’s Harvest, and A Dance of the Forests.
Which of the following playwrights did not write work belonging to the Theatre of the Absurd?
Tennessee Williams
Eugene Ionesco
Jean Genet
Samuel Beckett
Fernando Arrabal
Only Tennessee Williams did not write absurdist plays emphasizing the meaninglessness of human existence. (The Theatre of the Absurd was a primarily European phenomenon, and Williams was American.)
What is the subject of the play A Doll’s House?
nineteenth-century marital norms
shifting political regimes in Norway
wartime attitudes toward pacifists in Germany
social conventions surrounding treatment of the disabled
the miniaturization of urban life
Written by Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House concerns what the playwright considered to be the constricting aspects of marriage, motherhood, female domesticity, and public reputation versus private morality. The work is a tragedy and takes place in Ibsen’s native Norway in the late nineteenth century.
Who of the following is not an African dramatist?
Jean Rhys
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
Ola Rotimi
Ama Ata Aidoo
Wole Soyinka
While Jean Rhys is a renowned writer, she is Dominican and not African. Moreover, she was known for writing novels (including Wide Sargasso Sea and After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie) and not plays.
Which of these European playwrights was a staunch Marxist?
Bertolt Brecht
Friedrich Schiller
Eugene Ionesco
Jean Genet
Henrik Ibsen
This dramatist is Brecht, and his lifelong Marxist leanings were often visible in his aesthetics. His works include plays such as Mother Courage and Her Children, The Threepenny Opera, and Man Equals Man. He and his wife also co-founded and operated the Berliner Ensemble, an important post-war German theater company.