New York School Poets as Playwrights: O'Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler and the Visual Arts

The New York School Poets as Playwrights is a critical introduction to a little-known body of drama by four preeminent American poets. In this interdisciplinary study, Philip Auslander draws on the methods of art history, theatre history, and literary criticism. He argues that the plays reflect the transition that occurred within the New York School in the 1950s and 1960s, when the dominant Abstract Expressionist sensibility was being undermined by the Pop Art sensibility. He goes on to show that the plays anticipated the tone of American art and theatre of later decades, including the Off-Off-Broadway movement of the 1960s, and postmodernism.