Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Staging American Corporate Culture: 5 Early American Business Plays 1887-1917

Staging American Corporate Culture: 5 Early American Business Plays 1887-1917

Schwartz, Michael

Paperback

Series: Methuen Drama Play Collections

PlaysPlaywriting

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1350542415
ISBN13: 9781350542419
Publisher: Methuen Drama
Published: Aug 20 2026
Pages: 432
Weight: 1.00
Height: 1.00 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Five uproarious plays that chronicle the rise of the modern American business model through the impudent lens of late 19th and early 20th century Broadway.

This collection introduces the satirical examinations of business, found in American theatre through the 20th and 21st centuries. In many ways, these plays serve as a template for later works of art like the hit series Mad Men, Billy Wilder's The Apartment, and Meredith Willson's The Music Man: comedies of business, hustlers, and the hustled.

These plays range in theme and era from the volatility and dumb luck of late 19th century Wall Street (Bronson Howard's The Henrietta, 1887); to the farcical feverishness of making and losing money in business quickly (Winchell Smith and Byron Ongley's Brewster's Millions, 1906); to the practice of modern business scams (George M. Cohan's Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, 1910); to the growing prominence of advertising (Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackett's It Pays to Advertise, 1914); and implementing a seat-of-the-pants business model based on the popular idea of Scientific Management (Harry James Smith's A Tailor-Made Man, 1917).

The comedy, satire, and farce of these plays provides not only a portrait of the beginnings of modern American business, but a surprisingly timely examination of business morality (or lack of it). Accompanied by a scholarly introduction for the plays and time periods as a whole, as well as brief introductions to each play, Staging American Corporate Culture is a hugely entertaining and utterly interesting introduction to these late 19th and early 20th century attitudes

1 different editions

Also available

Also from

Schwartz, Michael

View All

Also in

Playwriting

View All