Time's arrows .... an 1889 lithograph of the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, also known as Custer's Last Stand. Photograph: Corbis

"Anybody can make history," Oscar Wilde quipped. "Only a great man can write it." This year on New York stages, many men and a few women have been attempting to rewrite and revise history in plays and musicals such as Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, The Scottsboro Boys, A Free Man of Color and the American tour of the Tricycle theatre's The Great Game: Afghanistan. Each of these shows takes a different relationship to the past, lampooning, satirising, recording, transforming or trying to create as accurate an account as possible. But when it comes to placing history on stage, should a playwright stick to the facts or create a fantasy?

This season is somewhat exceptional. The US largely lacks a tradition of historical drama. We pioneered the panorama and the pageant and with the living newspaper plays of the 1930s helped forge the transmutation of yesterday's headlines into tomorrow's two-act. But we have nothing like the history plays of Shakespeare to serve as a dramaturgical model. It is a truism that American theater is more often concerned with the personal than the political, with individual lives rather than grand historical movements, and this may in some ways explain the dearth. Which is not to say that we have no history plays

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