"It's one hell of a mess in here" : masculinity, the myth of the frontier, and the renunciation of the mother in Arthur Miller's Death of a salesman, David Mamet's American buffalo, and Sam Shepard's True west

Gerald Berkowitz categorized the American drama of the twentieth century as “realistic contemporary middle-class domestic melodrama and comedy,” believing “domestic” to be the most important attribute (2). “Not only are American plays about recognizable people in a recognizable world,” he argued, “but they are about the personal lives of these people” (3). Often the action takes place in a living room with the cast made up of family members, but it can also extend to the office and a circle of friends. In most cases it deals with a family crisis, which reflects the society at large, its dreams and aspirations, its conflicts and failures. One can find this set-up in the plays of O’Neill and Miller, of Albee and Williams, of Mamet and Shepard, to name just some of the most prominent playwrights