The Contrast.

Playwright Royall Tyler benefited from and contributed to the growing acceptance of the theater among early national Americans, becoming the nation's first successful playwright. His play The Contrast, first performed in New York on 16 April 1787, was a critical and popular success, commanding many repeat performances. Reviewers saw Tyler's play as an illustration of the advantages of theater and praised his achievement as living proof of American cultural vitality. The prologue to The Contrast proclaimed its nationalist purposes, describing the play as a "piece, which we may fairly call our own." The play took conventional plots and characters from eighteenth-century British drama and gave them a distinctively American cast. As a realistic depiction of American social life and manners, Tyler's play contributed to the quest for a literature based on American topics and themes.

Virtue versus Luxury.

In The...