Chapter 8 - Lecture notes 8 PDF

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Chapter 8: The modern theater Realism is a beguiling aesthetic philosophy. Indeed, the theatre has always taken “real life” as its fundamental subject, so realism seems at first glance to be an appropriate style with which to approach the reality of existence. Realism has its limits: any dramatic piece must involve a certain shaping and stylization, no matter how lifelike its effect and advocates of theatrical realism are well aware of this inevitability. This ideology of realism was tested, in every aspect of theatre-acting, directing, design, and playwriting-and the results of those tests form a body of theatre that is both valid and meaningful and a style that remains significant. A laboratory The realistic theater is conceived to be a laboratory in which the nature of relationships, the ills of society, and the symptoms of a dysfunctional family are set down for the final judgment of an audience of impartial observers. To the scientific method of the laboratory: nothing must ring false. The setting is to resemble the prescribed locale of the play as closely as possible. Costumes worn by characters in the realistic theatre follow the dress of real people of similar societal status; dialogue recreates the cadences and expressions of daily life. He proscenium stage was modified to accommodate scenery constructed in box sets. Realistic acting was judged effective insofar as it was drawn from the behavior of life and insofar as the actors seemed to be genuinely speaking to each other instead of playing to the audience. Realism presents its audience with an abundance of seemingly real-life evidence and permits each spectator to arrive at his or her own conclusions. Much of the excitement of the realistic theatre is occasioned by the genuine interpretive freedom. Realism encourages us to delve into the mystery that lies beneath-for the exploration of life’s mystery is the true. Realism’s characters, like people in life are defined by detail rather than by symbol or abstract idealization: like people we know, they are unpredictable and complex rather than absolute. The success of realism is well established; realism remains one of the dominant modes of drama to this day. As its most found, realistic theatre can generate powerful audience empathy by virtue of the insight and clarity it brings to real-world moments. The realist playwright gives us friends: fellow travelers on the voyage of human discovery with whom we can compare thoughts and feelings. Pioneers of Realism The premieres of 3 shocking plays by Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen: A doll’s house (1867), Ghosts (1881), and An Enemy of the People (1882). These works turned his attention to more contemporary and day-to0day themes: women’s role in society, hereditary disease and mercy killings and political hypocrisy. These plays retain their edge of pertinence even today and still have the power to inform, move, and even shock. In Germany, Gerhart Hauptmann explored the plight of the middle and proletarian classes in several works most notably in his masterpiece The Weavers (1892).

Chekhov’s technique was to create deeply complex relationships among his characters and to develop his plots and themes more or less between the lines. Every character is filled with secrets that are never revealed by the dialogue. Naturalism It represents an extreme attempt to dramatize human reality without the appearance of dramaturgical shaping. To the naturalist, human beings were biological phenomena whose behavior was determined by genetic and social circumstances. To portray a character as a hero was anathema to the naturalists, who eschewed dramatic conclusions or climaxes. Naturalist plays offered nothing more than a slice of life. The characters of the play were the play’s entire subject; any topical issues that arose served to facilitate the interplay of personalities and highlight the character’s situations, frustrations and hopes. The naturalists sought to eliminate every vestige of dramatic convention: all the great successes of the stage are triumphs over convention declared Zola. The term naturalism is often applied to those realistic plays that seem most lifelike. This is not a felicitous use of the term, because it ignores the fundamental precept of naturalism-that the human being is a mere figure in the natural environment. Naturalism is not a matter of style; it is a philosophical concept the nature of the human animal. And the naturalist represents a purposeful attempt to explore that concept using extreme realism as its basic dramaturgy. Antirealism The symbolist Rebellion Symbolism would explore the inner realities that cannot be directly or literally perceived. Symbolic characters would not represent real human beings but would symbolize philosophical ideals or warring internal forces in the human’s soul. Another goal of symbolism: to crush what its adherents deemed to be a spiritually bankrupt realism and to replace it with traditional aesthetic values-poetry, audacity, charm and superhuman magnitude. The symbolists demanded abstraction, enlargement and innovation; the symbolist spirit soared in poetic encapsulations, outsized dramatic presences, fantastical visual effects, shocking structural departures and grandiloquent speech. Purity of vision rather than accuracy of observation was the symbolist’s aim, and self0conscious creative innovation was to be their primary accomplishment. The first symbolist theatre was intended as a direct attack on naturalistic Theatre Libre of Andre Antoine. The theatres of Antoine and Fort had much in common: both were amateur, both gained considerable notoriety and each served as a center for a school of artistic ideology that attracted as much attention and controversy as any of its theatrical offerings. But the 2 theatres were at war. While Antoine was presenting premieres of naturalistic and realistic dramas by Henrik Ibsen, Emile Zola, Fort presented the staged poems and poetic plays of both contemporary and earlier

writers such as the French Arthur Rimbaud. Whereas Antoine would go to great lengths to create realistic scenery for his plays, Fort would prevail upon leading impressionist easel painters including Pierre Bonnard. The realist-versus-symbolist confrontation affected every aspect of theatre production. Symbolist-inspired directors and designers were altering the arts of staging and décor to accommodate the new dramaturgies that surged into the theatre. Realist directors such as Antoine found themselves challenged by scores of adversaries and renegades. The era of Isms Symbolism was coined as a direct contradiction of realism and movements named for their oppositional qualities-called for what they are not-are quickly seen as limited as critiques of art rather than as art itself. Symbolism as a movement was deserted by founders and followers alike. Where did they go? Futurism, Dadaism, idealism, impressionism, expressionism, surrealism and a hundred other isms-labeled movements now lost to time. The first third of the twentieth century was an era of theatrical isms, an era rich with continued experimentation by movements self-consciously seeking to redefine theatrical art. Ism theatres sprang up like mushrooms. A successful play was not merely a play but rather the forum for a cause and behind that cause was a body of zealous supporters and adherents who shared a deep aesthetic commitment. The experiments and discoveries of those early days of the twentieth century and the nonrealistic spirit of symbolism itself survive and flourish under a variety of formats: ritual theatre, poetic theatre, holy theatre, theatre of cruelty, existentialist theatre… These present-day groupings, unlike the isms are critic-defined rather than artist-defined; indeed, most theatre artists today reject any grouping nomenclature. Stylized Theatre We have chosen the rather loose term anti-realistic theatre or the stylized theater to embrace the entire spectrum of nonrealistic modern theatre, which exhibits a universal insistence on consciously stylizing reality into larger-than-life theatrical experience. Any theatre mode has its distinctive style but in the past eras that style was imposed by current convention and technological limitations. Modern dramatists have selected and created styles to satisfy their aesthetic theories, their social principles or their desire for novelty and innovation. Anti-realistic theatre attempts to create new theatrical formats, not to enhance the portrayal of human existence but also to disclose fundamental patterns underlying that existence: patterns of perception, association, personal and environmental interaction. Anti-realistic theatre does not altogether dispense with reality but wields it in often unexpected ways and enhance it with symbol and metaphor, striving to elucidate by parable and allegory, to deconstruct and reconstruct by language, scenery, and lighting. It makes explicit use of the theatre’s very theatrically reminding its audience members, directly or indirectly that they are watching a performance.

In stylized theatre, characters represent more than individual persons or personality types. Modern stylized plays often involve characters who represent forces of nature, moral positions, human instincts and the like entities such as death, fate… The stylized theatre resonates with tension and human frustration in the face of irreconcilable demands. It often uses whimsy and mordant wit as its dominant mode. The diversity of stylized theatrical works preludes further generalization about their shared characteristics. The French Avant-Garde: Ubu Roi The opening at the Theatre de I’Oeuvre in Paris was perhaps the most violent dramatic premiere in theatre history: the audience shouted, whistled, hooted… The term avant-garde comes from the military, where it refers to the advance battalion or the shock troops that initiate a major assault. Jarry, a diminutive iconoclast unleashed his radical shock troops from the moment the curtain rose. He had called for anti-realistic stage-painted scenery depicting a bed, a bared tree. Characters entered through a painted fireplace. Costumes were divorced as far as possible from color or chronology. And the title character stepped forward to begin the play with a word that quickly became immortal: Merde! Ubu Roi was a schoolboy play – a savage and often ludicrous satire on the theme of power. Expresionism: The hairy ape Expressionism is the one that has given rise to the most significant body of modern theatre, because of its broad definition and its seeming alliance with expressionism that was much in vogue in Germany during the first decades of the 20th century featured shocking and gusty dialogue, exaggerated scenery, piercing sounds, bright lights, an abundance of primary colors, jabbing scenes that built to a powerful climax. Expressionist writers addressed the growing concern that the country’s rapid industrial and financial successes were crushing human freedom and human nature itself. The Adding Machine and Street Cane , Elmer Rice attacked what he considered the dehumanization of modern American life. O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape is a one-act play featuring eight scenes. Its working man-hero yank meets and is rebuffed by the genteel daughter of a captain of industry. Enraged, Yank becomes violent and dies in the monkey cage of a zoo. Meta-theatre: Six Characters in search of an author First produced in 1921, Sic Characters in Search of an Author expresses from its famous title onward a metatheatrical motif by which the theatre itself becomes part of the content of play production. In this play Pirandello explores how the stage is also a world-and how the stage and the world, illusion and reality relate to each other. The characters beg the director to stage their lives in order that they may bring a satisfactory climax to their drama. This fantasy treats the audience to shifting perceptions but which id the real play and which the real life? It is no wonder that most audience gives up trying to untangle the planes of reality Pirandello creates in this play; they are si ply too difficult to comprehend except as a dazzle of suggestive theatricality.

Philosophical Melodrama: No exit by Jean-Paul Sarte It is one of the most compelling short plays ever written. Into it come 3 people, lately deceased, all condemned to this netherworld because of their earthly sins. The three are ill matches: Garcin, the sole man tends to homosexuality as does Inez, one of the 3 women, Estelle, the final occupant of this bizarre inferno tends toward heterosexual nymphomania. Estelle pursues Garcin, Garcin pursues his fellow spirit, Inez pursues the beautiful Estelle in a triangle of misdirected affection that one presumes will continue through all eternity. No Exit is a classic dramatic statement of existentialism, of which Sarte was the 20th century’s leading exponent. Each character in the play carries with him or her some baggage of guilt and expectation, each seeks from another some certification of final personal growth and each is thwarted in this quest. One can accept or reject Sarte’s view – which is more than usually pessimistic for having been written under the Nazi occupation of Sarte’s Paris. An amusing “valet” who brings each character onto the stage, and the highly contrived assemblage of mismatched characters all serve to focus the intellectual argument precisely. What Sartre presents is a general understanding of human affairs: a philosophy of interpersonal relations. Theatre of the Absurd: Wanting for Gordot by Matin Esslin. The name applies to a grouping of plays that share certain common structures and styles and are tied together by a common philosophical thread: the theory of the absurd as formulated by French essayist Albert Camus. Camus saw the modern individual as engaged in a futile task: the absurdity of searching for some meaning or purpose or order in human life. To Camus, the immutable irrationality of the universe is what makes this task absurd. The plays that constitute the theater of the absurd are obsessed with the futility of all action and the pointlessness of all direction. These themes are developed through a deliberate and self-conscious flaunting of the absurd-in the sense of the ridiculous. Going beyond the use of symbols and the fantasy and poetry of other non-realists, the absurdists have distinguished themselves by employing in their dramas. Samuel Beckett, the unquestioned leader of the absurdist writers, eschewed all realism, romanticism, and rationalism to create works that are unenlightening and committed to a final obscurity. Beckett had received the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was Godot first brought Beckett to worldwide attention: the play’s premiere in Paris in 1953 occasioned a great stir among French authors and critics and its subsequent openings in London and NY had the same effect there. Waiting for Godot is a parable without a message. On a small mound at the base of a tree, beside a country road, 2 elderly men in bowler hats wait for an “Mr.Godot”, with whom they have made an appointment. They believe that when Godot comes, they will be saved. However, they are not at all certain that Godot has agreed to meet them or if this is the right place or the right day or whether they will even recognize him if he comes. The old two men continue to wait as the curtain falls. Although there are substantial references in the play to Christian symbols and beliefs, it is not clear whether these imply positive or negative associations. The only

development in the play is that the characters undergo a certain loss of adeptness while the setting blossoms in rebirth. What Beckett has drawn here is a paradigm of human condition: an ongoing life cycle of vegetation serving as the background to human decay, hope, and ignorance. Beckett’s tone is whimsical: the characters play enchanting word games with each other with songs, accounts of dreams, exercises and vaudevillian antics, and in general they make the best of a hopeless situation. Beckett’s paradigm affords a field day for critical investigators. The play has generated a veritable library of evocative discussions, and few plays from any era have been so analyzed, interpreted and explored for symbolic meaning and content. Owing to the international critical acceptance of this play and its eventual public success absurdist drama, as well as the whole of modern stylized theatre was able to move out of the esoteric art theatre of the world capitals and onto the stages of popular theatres everywhere. Theatre of Alienation: The good person of Szechuan The epic theatre of alienation concentrates on humanity’s potential for growth and society’s capacity to effect change. The guiding genius of the theater of alienation was Bertolt Brecht: theorist, dramatist and director. Two ways of impact of Brecht: first, he introduced theatre practices that is utterly at variance with those in use since the time of Aristotle. Second, his accomplishments invigorated the theater with an abrasive humanism that reawakened its sense of social responsibility and its awareness of the capacity of theatre to mold public issues and events. Brecht’s theatre draws upon a potpourri of theatrical conventions, some derived from the ancients, some from eastern drama, and some from the German expressionist movement. He developed many conventions of his own: lantern-slide projections with printed captions, asides and invocations directed to the audience to encourage them to develop an objective point of view and also a variety of procedures. Brecht deplored the use of sentimentality and the notion of audience empathy for characters and attempted to create a performance style that was didactic: the actors were asked to alienate themselves or distance themselves from the character they played to demonstrate a character rather than to embody that character in a realistic manner. In Brecht’s view, the ideal actor was one who could establish toward his or her character a critical objectivity that would make clear the character’s social function and political commitment. In attempting to repudiate the magic of the theatre, he demanded that it be made to seem nothing more than a place for workers to present a meaningful parable of life, and he in no way wished to disguise the fact that the stage personnel – actors and stagehands-were workers doing their jobs. He attempted to prevent the audience from becoming swept up in an emotional sentimental bath of feelings: to keep the audience alienated or distanced from the literal events depicted by the play so that they would be free to concentrate.

Brecht’s theories were to have a staggering impact on modern theatre. He provided a new dramaturgy that encouraged playwrights, directors, designers… to tackle social issues directly rather them through the implications of contrived dramatic situations. Combining the technologies and aesthetics of other media-the lecture hall, the slide show, the public meeting – Brecht fashioned an expanded arena for his dialectics: his social arguments that sought to engender truth through the confrontation of conflicting interests. D Brecht was no mere propagandist and his epic theatre is not one of simple messages or easy conclusions. Brecht’s parables epictomize the conflicts between social classes: they do not presume to solve these conflicts. His plays reenact the basic intellectual dichotomy posed by Marx’s dialectical materialism; they are Marxist plays but not Leninist or Stalinist. They radiate in the human potential. Comedy of Contemporary manners: Bedroom Farce It is an ingenious comedy of current manners, novel in its dramatic structure and true to life in its concern. What the author has created in the play is something more than just another series of hijinks, physical incongruities and dramatic clichés; it is a wry combination of social satire, middle-class insights and boisterous good fun. The modern stylization can be seen in the intricacy of the plot design, which is echoed if not exceeded. Political Satire: Serious Money Causticity gives such criticism its necessary bite, but a playful or whimsical tone renders even the harshest criticism palatable-and in dangerous times, may also protect a playwright from political retri...