SOURCE: Sauer, David K. “George S. Kaufman's Exploitation of Women (Characters): Dramaturgy and Feminism.” American Drama 4, no. 2 (spring 1995): 55-80.

In the following essay, Sauer gauges Kaufman's development as a dramatist by the development of his skill in drawing characters.

George S. Kaufman's successes in the theater mark him as a theatrical genius: he wrote more than forty plays which appeared on Broadway (all but one with a collaborator), and he directed most of those plays, as well as 20 others, working simultaneously as director and “play doctor.” But because his work is collaborative, it is difficult to say what exactly was his contribution to a given play. As a result, lacking a single auteur to give credit or blame, until recently scholars have not paid much attention to his contributions to American drama.¹ The purpose of this paper is to take a further step towards defining part of that...