The global rise of modern drama in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries needs to be understood in relation to ideologies of the nation-state, war, histories of colonial rule, and the oppression of women. The emergence of modern drama, known as “spoken drama” in many Asian contexts, has largely been driven by engagement with discourses of Western liberalism and realist aesthetics. Canons of modern drama in Europe and the USA were not just upheld as representative of the nation and as exemplars of cultural excellence, they were also upheld as dominant colonial models (Luckhurst 2006). The rhetoric supporting Western dramatic canons tended to erase or deny influences from other world literatures and theaters. Thus, for much of the twentieth century, European- and American-received histories of modern drama were mostly white, self-referential, and exoticized or marginalized innovative playwrights and experiments from elsewhere. In the 1960s these patterns began to shift and in the twenty-first century the pace of change has accelerated markedly. Histories and readers in world theater have proliferated and the influence of Asian theater, especially Japanese theater, is beginning to be acknowledged (Salz 2016). In particular, there are concerted efforts to raise the visibility of work by playwrights of color and by women (Jones and Elam 2013). African American playwrights Lynn Nottage, Anna Deavere Smith, and Suzan-Lori Parks enjoy significant mainstream productions and are held in high esteem (Kolin 2007; Young 2012), their work looking to Africa, not to Europe, for its inspiration and impetus. Griselda Gambaro is revered as Argentina's most accomplished dramatist on the subject of her country's traumatic history. Caryl Churchill's work in England has attained remarkable global dissemination (Luckhurst 2015). And breaking a male-dominated world of Nobel awards, Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2004 for her transgressive, taboo-breaking writing. Global exchange maps are also morphing as old orders diminish and new balances of power emerge, with China and India exerting greater influence (Chen 2002, 2010). As a result, cutting-edge contemporary innovations in modern drama, not surprisingly, stem from World Theatre (Wetmore, Liu, and Mee 2014).

Modern drama's European origins in the 1880s are rooted in the Industrial Revolution, in the spread of democracy and imperial capitalism, and in the reformist and revolutionary protests voiced by the middle and working classes. Working in a Europe undergoing tumultuous social and political change, Henrik Ibsen (see Henrik Ibsen: Critique from Within), Anton Chekhov (see Defying Borders: Anton Chekhov's Elusive Genius), Elizabeth Robins, Gerhart Hauptmann, W.B. Yeats, and Nikolai Gogol were just a few of the celebrated playwrights who shaped early experiments. They were passionate about drama as literature and the rise of modern drama is coextensive with a late nineteenth-century privileging of the playwright and the play. In their own way, each of these dramatists brought the issues of the times directly onto the stage, challenged received ideas of acting and directing, redefined ideas of representation, and were committed to drama as a vehicle for political resistance. The content of drama became topical and recognizably reflected contemporary real-life challenges and issues beyond the stage.

Proponents of realist modern drama generally use it to explore individual psychology and behavior in specific contexts, and to challenge local establishment thinking by advocating for political, social, or legal reform. It is common in criticism for modern drama to be reduced to a map of either the psychological or the political; but the one cannot exist without the other, just as realism has many forms, complex manifestations, and politics. Realism has been more celebrated than non-realism in the academic axis between Britain and the USA but, in practice, non-realist plays and productions have also enjoyed widespread global circulation, such as the works of Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett (see Samuel Beckett and World Literature: Toward the Universal), Edward Albee, and Jon Fosse. Without doubt, the introduction of the European canon has resulted in exciting new interpretations and performance aesthetics, and in innovative hybridized dramatic forms in Africa, Asia, India, Oceania, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Critical theorizations of these intercultural texts and transnational theaters are nascent and invigoratingly divergent from one another (Bharucha 1993, 2000; Gilbert and Tompkins 1996; Balme 1999; Lo and Gilbert 2002; Gilbert and Lo 2009; Liu 2013; Westlake 2017).

The great power of modern drama has been that its forms lend themselves to appropriation and adaptation by playwrights the world over to support or oppose political regimes, protest against war and atrocity, and to promote particular human rights and social issues (Biodun 2002; Shillington 2002; Becker, Hernandez, and Werth 2013; Luckhurst and Morin 2015). A famous example of the power of drama is exemplified by Vaclav Havel's resistance to communist dictatorship in Czechoslovakia, in part through the secret performance and dissemination of his absurdist plays, which satirized the regime. After the fall of communism Havel became the first president of the new Czech Republic from 1993–2003, his status as a theater writer symbolic of a new freedom of speech and of communal resistance.

India provides an interesting example of the adaptation of forms for the promotion of social justice (Bhatia 2011). Two notable playwrights and political campaigners were Bijon Bhattacharya (1915–1978) and Prithviraj Kapoor (1906–1972). Bhattacharya staged plays about the destitution of the rural poor in his native Bengal and his play Nabanna, inspired by the famine in Bengal in 1943, became a popular vehicle to express protest. Kapoor founded the traveling company, Prithvi Theatres, in Mumbai in 1944. His plays enjoyed mass viewing and significant influence: they vigorously rejected British rule and rallied young audiences to push for Indian independence. His play Pathan, a story about the friendship between a Muslim and a Hindu, was staged more than 600 times. Since the 1990s, Indian women inspired by feminism have begun to make their voices heard, especially in relation to violence against women (Mukherjee 2005; Singh 2013). In the 1990s, Deena Mehta's Brides Are not for Burning was a resonant play: it exposed the misery of the domestic abuse of brides deemed unworthy by their new spouse and their in-laws. Mehta called on everyone in these familial abuse networks to be held to account and raged against the complicity of women in the abuse. Manjula Padmanaban's Lights Out! continues to generate discussion and explores the theme of gang rape and the shaming and ostracism of female victims of male violence in India.

The rapid growth of drama by women that focuses on social justice issues is a recent feature in every continent. Many women work in exceptionally difficult circumstances and in fear for their lives. Religious and social freedoms are particular problems for female playwrights in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Fathiya El-Assal in Egypt, a noted dramatist, politician, and activist who died in 2014, famously challenged Egyptian government edicts and championed women's rights in her plays. Similarly, Jalila Baccar, a playwright and actress, has fought a high-profile political campaign against religious repression and her dramas, Khamsoun and Junun, are intimately connected with women's struggle for free speech and political freedom in Tunisia. The value of drama in communicating health education, especially in countries such as South Africa, has been tellingly demonstrated by Sindiwe Magona in her play Vukani/Wake Up! Magona addresses the taboo of AIDS, its prevention, and the myths surrounding its transmission. The fact that she wrote the play in Xhosa was important in disseminating its message to local communities and also in promoting Xhosa culture, known for the power of its performance traditions (Perkins 2008).

On today's mainstream global circuit, Chekhov and Ibsen, who were pioneers of modernist drama, remain significant literary and theatrical models. Ibsen's A Doll's House, about a woman's right to independence, and Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, about the demise of a feudal, landowning aristocracy and the rise of a new order, have been continually translated, adapted, and made the subject of ambitious intercultural experiments. Conversely, Elizabeth Robins's Votes for Women!, a play from the same era, is well known in Anglophone educational arenas but professional productions are rare. Unlike A Doll's House and The Cherry Orchard it was highly unusual for its time in depicting a women's suffrage rally and a woman's personal hardships endured in the pursuit of political activism. But Robins, like the majority of female playwrights, has suffered from cultural oppression, from the patriarchal bias in critical studies and canon formation, and from the male dominance of the material production of theater. Typically, Robins's play also has a checkered publishing history and for long periods was out of print (Chothia 2001). Feminist historians have eventually championed Robins, but many excellent plays by women have simply never been staged or published. Many plays have been lost because they were not considered worthy of archiving. Many more women are still fighting for the right to learn to read and write, for the opportunity to participate fully (or at all) in public life, and for the right to even attend theater, let alone write, perform, or manage a company. The rise of world theater and the dissemination of its literatures and productions are vital to the continuing battle for base-level equality that so many women face.

The chapters that follow celebrate male playwrights of extraordinary significance in modern drama. Some paid a high price for speaking out against injustice and state oppression and all faced the challenges of official and unofficial censorship in their cultures. Wole Soyinka (see Wole Soyinka: Art, Politics, and the (African) World) experienced imprisonment for his campaigns against dictatorship in Nigeria and went into hiding during the Civil War; Bertolt Brecht (see How Bertolt Brecht Managed to Forge a Defamiliarized World Theater) spent much of his writing life in exile from fascist Germany; and Vijay Tendulkar introduced new, real-life stories from the lower classes into Marathi theater, challenging the inhumanity of India's caste system, the social denigration of women, and the deep-seated cultural toleration of family violence. Osanai Kaoru brought Western drama to Japan and laid the foundations for shingeki theater, which has functioned as a form of social protest. Syrian playwright Saʿdallah Wannous (see Saʿdallah Wannous: Syria's Premier Political Playwright and Social Critic) experimented with models from European modern drama in the Middle East, founding a new movement that used plays to criticize the lack of free speech in the region. August Strindberg and Samuel Beckett challenged realist agendas through new aesthetic forms and found a resistive politics in surrealism, expressionism, and absurdism. Active in the French Resistance during the German occupation, Beckett wrote minimalist dialogue and reduced sets to bare stages. His philosophically complex plays defied psychological explanation and reflected his experience of a continent ravaged by World War II and of the blackly comic pointlessness of human endeavor. Although all these playwrights are male, what is striking is that the representation of women's struggle for independence and basic rights has been vitally important in much of their work; indeed it is a subject that is one of the markers of modernity.

Theater problematizes literary models because production is not necessarily dependent on the publication of a text to generate cultural impact. As a multidimensional live form with varying conventions of performance spectatorship, much performance is not necessarily served well by the printed word. Print circulation is important in times of political oppression and when introducing a new form. Cao Yu, for example, who is credited with introducing Ibsen's model of modern drama to China, published Thunderstorm, about the destruction of a family through incest, in a literary magazine in 1934, and Sunrise, about the neglect and exploitation of women in Shanghai, in 1937. Both became celebrated, foundational texts of Western-inspired modern drama in China. However, the print tradition in many cultures is secondary to oral traditions of live storytelling or story as transmitted through the performer's body through dance or song. Orality poses particular problems in relation to Western notions of circulation as it depends on live exchange. Archived recordings for posterity, presented as a “solution” by many Western thinkers, do little to address the fact that performers in oral cultures continually reinterpret through voice and body. Likewise, translation of play texts is a vexed issue. Metaphor, humor, speech rhythms, and colloquial poetics are frequently compromised or lost and these negotiations are particularly fraught between East and West and old colonizers and newly independent countries. Lastly, Western presses favor the publication of translations that have been produced in the West, which is a considerable hurdle for much innovative work.

In dominant, mainstream models of theater, dissemination is dependent on the cultural value attributed to the dramatist, director, performers, profile of the theater company, production or festival venue, and funders (and the cultural value of each of these will vary). Cultural value dictates import and export in the global theater market and often depends on what governments, funders, and producers want to sell as authentic, distinctive, and significant about a given culture. Plays are read by those who can afford to buy books: those readers may be remote from the opportunity to attend productions or may engage with texts in educational, community, training, or production settings. These contexts, however, have mushroomed beyond old colonial paradigms as professional theater companies have proliferated, non-professional companies and other communities have sought to assert themselves, and as school and university teaching of modern drama and intercultural theater studies has boomed worldwide. Cultural exchanges, international company tours and arts festivals, applied theater projects in local communities, the internet, and social media have also provided crucial platforms for the dissemination of plays, production footage, and information on playwrights and performances. Collaborative theater projects and verbatim theaters that relay the words of real people also pose challenges to the dominant model of one writer representing all. And increasingly the reliance on particular types of building for the performance of drama is seen as a form of elitism that favors urban centers in wealthy regions. The definition of modern drama is more and more under scrutiny from playwrights and practitioners who challenge established assumptions and see themselves as cultural provocateurs.

SEE ALSO: Bridge Essay: Shifting Paradigms in Orality, Literacy, and Literature; Bridge Essay: Gender and Representation: New Approaches to Medieval Literature; Introduction to World Literature 1920 to the Early Twenty‐First Century; Bridge Essay: From Human Rights to Social Justice: Literature and the Struggle for a Better World