Changing Stages on PBS

Part 3. British director Richard Eyre visits America to recall “the golden age of Broadway.” It began in 1916, with Eugene O'Neill's “A Long Day's Journey Into Night,” “the saddest play ever written,” says Eyre, who adds that O'Neill, was “the first writer to lay bare the bleak materialism of the American dream.” Eyre also essays New Deal leftist dramas; the rise of the musical with 1927's “Showboat”; and dramatists who thrived in the 1940s and '50s, including Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. In the '50s, says Eyre, “there was real poetry on the American stage.”