THE IMAGE OF THE CITY IN AMERICAN DRAMA Mahmoud F. AI-Shetawl (University of Qatar) From the beginning, Americans conceived of their society as urban and founded cities in the New World.1 Since most of the early settlers of America originally came from Europe, they brought with them the process of urbanization which took America by storm; thus burgeoing industrial cities systematically mushroomed everywhere in the country. Indeed, through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and by the turn of the nineteenth century America was turning into a predominantly urban nation and the majority of Americans were becoming city dwellers. With the advent of the twentieth century the city or urban center became the characteristic landmark of American landscape. The urban development of the United States of America has been exhaustively discussed in different studies, and it is not the concern of this paper to look into this matter again.2 Instead I propose to examine the varied treatment of the city in modern American drama and reveal the attitude of American dramatists toward their urban society. Though the subject has been duly documented with respect to fiction and, to some extent, poetry, its consideration in drama remains yet to be fully investigated.3 The corpus of American drama set in urban milieus i$ too large to be considered in an article of this length, and perhaps needs to have a full-length book devoted to it. Therefore, the topic will be limited to some selected plays which, in my opinion, highlight the treatment of the city quite significantly and are commonly recognized as major plays. These include, as examples, Street Scene, Awake and Sing! The Glass Menagerie, .lle.a1h of a Salesman, A Bajsjn jn the Sun and others which will be cited in the course of the paper. Diverse as these plays may be in terms of style and social outlook, they still deal with a common theme: the petty conditions of American cities and the struggle, though mostly futile, of the protagonists to escape from a deterministic urban environment to which they find themselves bound. This negative depiction of the city is mainly conveyed in using the city as mise-en-scene for the plays. Mostly set in urban settings (New York City is the most popular), these plays associate the city with images of entrapment and desperation suggesting the alienation and unfulfilled hopes of the characters. 39