A Study On The Modern Morphology Of Woody Allen’s One-act Plays

Woody Allen(1935-)is one of the most famous cinema directors and playwrights in modern U.S.He is well-known for his film works.During his nearly sixty years of film directorship,he has become popular all over the world for his creative energy,high-quality,artistic pursuit and humanistic care.He has won many awards at major film festivals around the world and honored as one of the greatest film masters still alive.Woody Allen’s drama works are also very worthy of attention.His dramatic creation career and film director career began almost at the same time,and showed a high degree of artistic unity and authorship.Since 1966,Woody Allen has created 14 one-act plays,which have been highly praised worldwide,and are regarded as outstanding representatives of contemporary American theater art.His drama works embody his pursuit of the artistic form of "great comedy".While widely absorbing the advantages of modern theater art,especially the absurd theater,he also has unique thinking about theater art,which made his plays quite experimental.Compared to their film works,these one-act plays have even more obvious modern characteristics in terms of literary themes and artistic structure.However,it is a pity that the domestic research on Woody Allen basically only pays attention to his film works,but rarely pays attention to his drama creation.This article uses Woody Allen’s 14 one-act plays as the research text,combined with Woody Allen’s life experience,dramatic structure and theme research,and the American social and cultural conditions of his time.It is divided into four chapters on the holistic study of Allen’s one-act play creation.The first chapter mainly sorts out the formation of the creative concept of Woody Allen’s one-act plays,combining his stage career as a Stand-up Comedian,the use of the one-act play and the artistic inheritance of the absurd comedy,to clarify the cause of his unique style of oneact plays;Chapter II discusses the modernity structure of his one-act play,taking the main feature of "disorder" as the breakthrough point,analyzing the artistic form in his dramatic works,and discovering the modern significance of this form;Chapter III mainly analyzes the themes of his plays and focuses on the dissolution and "degradation" of the various traditional ideological values displayed in modern society,and summarizes the modernity theme of his plays;Chapter IV takes the social and cultural perspective as a starting point to explore the cultural background of modern American society behind the drama creation.This thesis hopes to explore the achievements of Woody Allen’s one-act play creation through a comprehensive analysis of his overall drama creation,and to establish a certain and valuable foundation for subsequent research in this area.