Modern drama resembles a child half wise, in both knowing and not knowing its own father. By familiar usage, consecrated in the textbooks, Ibsen is “the father of modern drama”; the phrase instantly evokes the companion term “naturalism,” followed perhaps by a dim after-image of A Doll House, the consensual firstborn of our present theatrical age. This familiar view of the father has its partial truth, yielding certain academic rewards. It invites the editing of anthologies laid out on a taut straight line from Ibsen to Arthur Miller, with occasional detours into the essential non-realistic styles; or, if the anthologist is less sympathetic to Naturalism, it allows a backward glance at Hedda Gabler before one takes off for the real beginnings of modern drama somewhere in the volcanic foothills of Strindberg, finally to disappear in the farthest out thickets of the Grove Press.