THE2000 Final Exam Notes PDF

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THE2000 with Dr. Osborne...

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Module 5 Theatre in Practice: Acting  Acting skills: o Build a character o Interpret and analyze a text o Physical and emotional/ physiological reality  Actor training: o Dance o Singing o Dialect o Diction o Movement o Stage combat o Relaxation o Yoga o Pilates  Acting requires: o Discipline o Concentration o Imagination o Playfulness o Thick skin o Self-confidence o Drive and passion o Trained instrument o Skill  Why training matters: o Endurance  Film vs. theatre  Film you only have to capture emotions/scene once  Theatre you have to capture those emotions every day for seven days a week and fifty-two weeks a year o Willingness to take chances (try something new in rehearsals)  Example: Johnny Depp (large range of roles)  Acting vocabulary: o Given circumstances: the information’s that’s explicit given to you by the playwright o Imagined circumstances: the information that’s implied or the backstory of the text o Objectives: what the actor is fighting for at any given moment o Obstacles: what stands in the way of the actor getting his/her objective o Tactics: strategies that an actor employs to overcome obstacles o Text: words on the page

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o Subtext: meaning layered underneath the words Approaches to acting: o Outside-in: presentational acting; looks at physical first  Example: Harrison Ford determines what haircut would work best for the character, and this is how he begins to see himself as that character;  Example: Richard III has a hunchback, and actors often adjust to that first  Example: stomping, clowning, miming  Example: Bill Irwin has extensive background in clowning; he was in Elmo’s world and has performed on Broadway; he created “The Record of Flight,” and he gives careful attention to every move he makes  Example: Cirque du Soleil is an international troupe that use spectacle, music, dance, acrobatics, and acting  The emotions appear to emerge from physicality; the audience sees what the emotions look like  Problem: can appear too mechanical  Pro: can be replicated with skill o Inside-out: representational acting; looks at psychological/emotional first  If the actor is actually feeling the same emotions as the character, then whatever is supposed to happen physically will just happen (it will happen naturally)  Problem: very difficult to reproduce, and inconsistent  Solution: Konstantin Stanislavski came up with a scientific system that would allow actors to act from a representational perspective, and reproduce it reliably; he redefined acting (acting “system”)  One of the key components of Stanislavski’s method was emotional memory, which later became known as the “magic if.”  Emotional memory: it’s controversial because it asks actors to think back in their own life experiences and to find ways to recreate those emotional memories o This causes some actors to become unstable because they can get so involved in their own personal memories that they’re not actually playing that character on stage anymore  Stanislavski believed relaxation was key, and that if an actor was not relaxed than an actor cannot focus on reproducing that role (this is where yoga and meditation is important)  Method acting: extreme version of inside-out approach; pioneered in the U.S.  Example: In the movie Marathon Man, Hoffman stayed up for three days straight, just as his character did.  Magic if: allows an actor to basically imagine what would happen if …  “What would I do if … “  Actor imagines situations

 Cornerstone of Stanislavski’s system o A lot of present-day actors use both presentational and representational approaches to acting Theatre of the World: The United States  What are some of American theatre’s major historical landmarks? o Ford’s Theatre  The show was Our American Cousin (1858), and at the end of the performance John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln (1865)  Pivotal moment in U.S. history and theatre history  John Wilkes Booth was a famous actor, and came from a famous acting family o The Colonies:  Colonists had a national identity crisis, having left everything behind in Europe  Theatre was a way that we figured out what that American identity was going to be, and how an American character was going to be formed  Royal Tyler’s The Contrast (1787) was the first play ever written by an American and performed in this country  Royal Tyler created many characters that became archetypes for future ways of thinking about American characters o American manliness (tough, soldier, honorable) o British foppery (make fun of British people) o Stage Yankee / Yankee Jonathan (good, loyal, hardworking, not so smart, protects people that are weaker than him, and makes sure everyone is happy)  This character type has endured through the ages  Most important archetype  Example: Joey from Friends  Example: Andy Dwyer from Parks and Recreation  Enduring and an ideal American character in a lot of ways o The Astor Place Riot (1849):  Issues of identity, nationalism, patriotism, citizenship, and rabblerousing are still present in the U.S.  The Astor Place Riot is the embodiment of class division in the United States during the nineteenth century  According to the Constitution, class is not supposed to exist, and yet it does  It started as a conflict between two major actors o Edwin Forrest:  One of the most popular American actors of the nineteenth century

He was a manly man, and had a physical approach Audience: Bowery boys and the working class  The Bowery boys were a gang in New York, and were the working class o William Charles Macready:  British actor  Approach: emotional  Always thinking pensively  Often portrayed looking into the distance, and thinking deep thoughts  Ideal character to play Hamlet  Audience: upper class Forrest and Macready became symbolic of this class struggle that was ripping through New York in the mid-nineteenth century Tensions grew when Forrest and Macready played the same role on the same night only a few blocks from each other in downtown New York Astor Place Riot began over competing productions of Macbeth  Two nights before the riot, the bowery brothers put out word that they wanted to harass Macready a little bit  So, large crowds began showing up at the Astor Place Opera House, which is an upper-class theatre  Some of the working class, would get tickets and harass Macready  By the end of the second night, Macready was fed up with people throwing stuff at him and heckling during his performances  A lot of upper-class individuals put together a petition, so that Macready would continue his performances, and he did  On the third night, word spread that there was going to be a riot at the Astor Place Opera House o This was to get rid of Macready, and show the upper class who was boss in the streets of New York  Twenty-thousand working class people gather around the opera house outside, while some go in to harass Macready during his performance  Half-way through his performance he calls it quits, and at this point the riot has already begun  They begin breaking windows, doors, and everything down  Macready runs away and hides  The police try to calm down the crowd, and they call in the National Guard  National Guard try to calm down the crowd, but it doesn’t work  The National Guard begin shooting, first in the sky, second at the feet, and third at chest level o Around 20-200 people die o People fled  

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o Police were arresting people with riot-oriented wounds in hospitals and clinics, so many people didn’t end up seeking medical attention  The importance of the Astor Place Riot:  First time an American militia fired on American citizens outside of war  Demonstrating and reinforcing how clear those class divisions have become in American entertainment (the class later become engrained in American theatre culture) How did American theatre show divisions in American society during the 19th century? o Upper class entertainment:  Excited about things imported from England, and Europe  Like the famous British actor William Macready, opera, ballet, and European touring companies o These would bring the high culture of Europe to the United States, and the upper-class hoped it would rub off on them o Middle class entertainment:  Excited about things surrounding middle class morality and education  Loved entertainment focused in on American society and culture, but demonstrate high moral values and the ability to spread education through the middle class  Melodramas have clear-cut good guys and bad guys, and always end with poetic justice  Reinforce middle class morality  Temperance melodrama: designed to discourage people who were planning to drink to excess  Abolitionist melodrama:  Feminist melodrama: o In Under the Gaslight (1867), a Civil War veteran gets tied to the railroad tracks, and the heroine saves him before the train runs him over  Dime museums: usually contain odd items, and have background/stories  Example: Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum (three headed cats, Siamese twins)  Vaudeville: clean, family oriented entertainment  Example: variety performances (animal acts, skits, acrobats, dancing, singing, cake walk)  No swearing o Working class entertainment:  Did not have necessarily have the moral or educational components that the middle-class entertainments had  Funny, quick, fun entertainment  Minstrelsy: popular yet racist form of entertainment

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 Portrays stereotypes of African Americans  Physical humor  Wordplay / puns  Music and dancing  Edwin Forrest portrays the idea of Americanness, and was very popular with the working class  Burlesque: started as parody, and involved a bare skin element  Lydia Thompson & the British Blondes: famous burlesque performer, and troupe from Britain What characterizes U.S. theatre in the early 20th century? o Major movements in the early 20th century American theatre:  Little theatre movement (1912-1918):  People get tired of melodrama, and spectacles / commercial appeal  They want to do something different, so they look into the free theatre movement in Europe (experimenting with realism and naturalism)  Little theatres pop up around the country, and usually are in barn or fish houses  Little theatre = small audience  Important little theatre houses: o Jane Adam’s Hull House (Chicago) connected to a school o Toy Theatre (Boston) o Provincetown Players (Provinctown, Massachusetts)  Group of writers that came together, and turned a fishhouse into a theatre  Eugene O’Neill  Susan Glasell:  Before the Provinctown Players, she was a journalist, and a freelance writer  She was very educated, and made a living on her own from her writing  In 1931, she won a Pulitzer Prize for Alison’s House  Trifles is a very short play, and a murdermystery o This play is based on a true story she covered when she was a journalist  Federal theatre project (1935-1939):  The only U.S. national theatre  This was during the Great Depression, which had 25% of the nation’s workers unemployed and thousands of people too poor to make ends meet

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President Franklin Roosevelt creates the New Deal, with a project being the W.P.A, and part of that is the federal theatre project This program intended to provide work relief during the Great Depression Theatre would go back to work in theatres, writers would go back to work writing, and artists would go back to creating art for the country (everyone goes back to work in their respective fields) The federal theatre project employed 13,000 people in 22 states, and they performed to more than 30 million people This is when theatre becomes more accessible to not only the upper class but the working class (this is taken away by the midnineteenth century) Performances: o Circuses o Children’s shows o Classics (Shakespeare) o Living newspapers ( One Third of a Nation): gathers research and information about a specific topic, and then works on how to present that to an audience o New work:  The Cradle Will Rock written by Marc Blitzstein, and directed by Orson Welles in NY (1937)  Focused in on unions, and the problems specifically in the steel industry  This play was released around the peak of steel worker strikes  This play is set in Steel Town USA is run by Mr. Mr, and he owns everything in this town  Everyone that doesn’t agree with him gets tossed into jail  Supposed to open in the summer of 1937 with the federal theatre project, but it didn’t  Many argued this was one of the shows really censored by the U.S. government  The show was cancelled  The actors are confronted with armed guards, and a padlock theatre (they’re told they can’t get anything out from the theatre)  The actors believe it is important for this play to go on, so they try and get support  They call up Hallie Flanagan, who is the national director of the federal theatre,

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and she says that she cannot support or help them  They call the Actors Union and Musicians Union, and they both say they cannot support them  Orson Welles finds another spot to put on the production  The solution:  They put the producer, Mark Blitzen, on the stage (he’s dead in the union), and he played all of the music for the show  Then, some actors and musicians joined in but could not actually go up on the stage o If they are in the union and go on stage, then they will get kicked out of the union  Common theme: prostitution (selling-out) (not sexual) What was the Golden Age of American Theatre (1940s-1950s)? o Four major playwrights:  Thornton Wilder  Pulitzer Prize, and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner  Our Town o Minimalist (not much scenery and props) o Universality of the human experience o Stage manager  His plays require amazing acting skills  Hopeful playwright  Eugene O’Neill  Dark, depraved, and disturbing plays  Not hopeful  He had a miserable childhood  Long Day’s Journey into Night  The Iceman Cometh  Irish-American cycle  Drew out from melodrama and spectacles  Tennessee Williams  Glass Menagerie  A Streetcar Named Desire  Wrote more than 25 full-length plays  Arthur Miller  Playwright from the 1940s-1990s  Plays focus in on the American experience  His first year in college, he wrote his first play

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o This play won a contest, which funded the tuition Death of a Salesman o One of the most important plays of the twentieth century o The American dream might not be all it’s cracked up to be o Willy Loman a tragic hero?  Tragedy in the Common Man argued Willy is an American tragic hero  America had working class people that worked hard, and tried to attain the American Dream  That failure was the tragedy

Genres: Performance Art and Contemporary Theatre  How did U.S. theatre shift during th 1960s and beyond? o Rigid Idea of American-ness in the 1950s  Those who found success were:  White  Men  Middle-class  Christian  Heterosexual  This idealized America (white picket fence) o The Backlash 1960s  Vietnam War  Anti-establishment  Anti-conformity  Young people rethink their place in the world, and find their identities o Identities conflict:  Religion  Family connections  Sexual orientation  Cultural heritage  Race  Ethnicity  Politics  Morality  This leads to fragmentation  What is performance art? o Performance art:  Thought realism was too limiting  Performance art defies traditional theatre, and blurs the line between actor and audience  Often not text-based

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o Yoko Ono:  Cut Piece was a piece that had the audience to come up on stage, and cut a piece of her clothing off for them to keep  Comment on violence and submission  Stereotypes of the east by the west (orientalism)  Easterners are submissive, while Westerners are in control  In Japan the audience was subdued, while in London the audience was aggressive  She did this again in 2003 for world peace o Aesthetic distance:  Allows the audience to know what’s happening on stage is not real (it’s a performance) o Chris Burden:  Challenged the idea of aesthetic distance  Shoot is a performance where Burden made one of his friends shoot him in front of an audience  The audience assumed that there was aesthetic distance, but alas it was real  What questions does it raise?  Violence in the U.S. society  U.S. fascination with depictions of violence (gangster movies)  Americans being shot in a seemingly senseless war (Vietnam War)  Forces the audience to become active participants (they knew it was happening, and did nothing about it)  His performances defy conventional theatre norms, focuses on the body, and challenged actor/audience distinction o With performance art:  Look at the piece in context  Don’t just dismiss the piece  Look at the larger message How does performance continue to mirror, influence, and challenge its community? o The 1990s and the Culture Wars:  Culture Wars by James Davison Hunter  Conflict between conservative and traditional values, and liberal and very progressive values  Covers hot button issues:  Abortion  Gun control  Climate change  Immigration  Homosexuality  Censorship  Separation of church and state  U.S. is still divided/polarized

o Annie Sprinkle:  Porn star turned performance artist  She wants to make the female body magical and fun  Her goals:  Demystify and celebrate the body  Sex-positivity  Break the boundary between the actor and audience  “Queen of kink” and “Mother Theresa of sex”  Public Cervix Announcement is a show where she shows the audience her cervix o Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena  Undiscovered Amerindians was a show where Coco and Guillermo dressed up as “natives” and locked themselves in a cage  Performing “nativeness”  It’s supposed to be a critique of the way that Americans exoticize others  Modernized freakshow  The audience thought it was real (not a performance) o NEA4  NEA stands for National Endowment for the Arts  In 1990, the NEA withdraws funding from 4 performance artists for “lack of decency”  Robert Mapplethorpe  Received the grant for beautiful photographs of flowers  Used the grant for an exhibit that contained photos with nudity, gay erotica, and BDSM  The NEA wanted their funding back, which turned into a huge debate o The government was funding gay erotica, and many people were against that o Talked about censorship, and the role of government in funding art  In 1990, Jesse Helms focused attention on 4 performance artists who had received NEA grants:  Karen Finely o Most aggressive o Poetic, personal trauma, and politics o Her body is a major part of her performance (nudity involved) o At the end of her show, A Different Kind of Intimacy, she stripped down and smeared herself with chocolate  Political statement about violence against women  Desexualizes the male gaze  Holly Hughes

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Tim Miller John Fleck

Their work pushed boundaries Controversial pieces, and controversial issues They group together, and sue the NEA o This case went all the way to the Supreme Court o NEA4 wins the case o The NEA then decided to no longer fund individual artists How does contemporary performance break new boundaries? o Site specific theatre: any theatrical performance done at a unique, specifically adapted location (not a theatre)  Examples: hotel, warehouse, church  Active for the audience (often walking around, and interacting)  Chicago Shakespeare and Richard Jordan Productions:  Walking theatrical experience  Journey through Downtown Chicago o Immersive theatre: invites the audience into the experience as part of the story  Interactive sets/spaces  Often site-specific as well  Blurs line between actor and audience o Devised theatre: creative process (not a product)  Begins with no script  Collaborative process (democratic process)  Improvise around idea  Fixed when public  Samantha Johns and George McConnell:  Process = “playing”  Exploration  Start with a singular idea

Module 6 Theatre in Practice: Stage Combat  What are the rules of stage combat? o These rules come from the Society of American ...