Ch7: Farce and Satire

Background • Farce is a simplified dramatic form derived

from comedy and the human psychology that seeks out fun for fun’s sake along with the fulfillment of socially unacceptable fantasies.

• One critic called farce a “veritable structure of absurdities”

• Farce best defined as a comedy of situation• Sees life as aggressive, mechanical, and

coincidental, and entertains us with seemingly endless variations on a single situation.

• The “psychology of farce,” as Eric Bently called it, is that special opportunity for the fulfillment of our unmentionable wished without taking responsibility for our actions or suffering the guilt.

Farce and comedy• Because farce grows out of an improbable, absurd

situation, its principal characters are comedy’s familiar types taken to extremes.

• Fools have frequented farce since Greek and Roman comedy and the “masks” of the Italian commedia dell’arte of the 15th century.

• Sir Toby Belch (Twelfth Night), Puck (A Mid-summer Night’s Dream), Dogberry (Much Ado About Nothing), and Launcelot Gobbo (The Merchant of Venice)

• They are monuments to human stupidity and mischievousness, reminding us that the human race has its fools and impostors.

Farce and Comedy

• Farce as a subform of comedy recklessly abandons us in a fantasy world of violence (without harm), adultery (without consequences), and brutality (without risk).

• Our fatansies- call them imagined pranks permit more primitive, antisocial impulses to express themselves in ways that both our conscious and our unconscious would habitually forbid.

• Like Freud’s interpretations of jokes, farce is a fantasy of humor acting out on stage our impulses on the one hand to pleasure and self-indulgence and on the other hand to aggression and hostility.

Farce and Comedy

• Writers associated with the theater of the absurd, such as Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett, exploit the practical joke to comment on the ridiculousness of lives lived in a universe without meaning.

• Ionesco subtitled The Chairs, a “tragic farce”• Notes and Counter Notes• In the context of the existential, farce becomes a

means of facing up to a universe that has lost its meaning and purpose.

Farce and comedy• In one sense, farce is drama’s safety valve; it releases the steam of

our antisocial wishes(and fantasies) for revenge, aggression, violence, disruption, and offense.

• Farce has also been part of some of the world’s great comedies, including those of Shakespeare and Molière.

• Their rehearsal is a series of blunders and their performance is an artistic disaster, but the bumpkins are received with good humor and indulgence rather than punishment.

• Farce has it’s place in drama’s forms, for it’s one facet of human psychology.

• Farce is not unrelated to satire, and vice versa. In almost all of the world’s great comedies are to be found elements of both farce and satire.

Satire and Society• Satire is also a subform of comedy that exposes, criticizes, and

censors humanity’s vices and cruelties with humor, wit, irony, and even cynicism.

• Its aim is corrective, through laughter and ridicule to hold human greed, hypocrisy, and evil up for examination and moral judgment.

• The good of society is the ultimate goal in the satirist’s attack on human folly and vice.

• Molière Tartuffe and The Misanthrope• Satir uses wit (sophisticates language) and exaggeration to expose

or attack evil and harmful foolishness• Modern satire has its roots in Old Comedy and the satyr plays of

the early Greek festivals.

Satire and Society

• Satire’s linguistic origins are to be found in the Greek’s satyr plays of the 15th century, which were written to accompany the trgedies.

• The satyr play most often was a burlesque treatment of mythology(often ridiculing the gods and heroes) in boisterous action and dance accompanied by incident language and gesture.

• Later comedies of Aristophanes that commented on contemporary society, politics, and literature, satire has always reflected a seriousness of purpose – to correct and reform.

Satire and Society

• Then satire disappears and its sister form, farce, reverts to domestic trifles. The great democracies of the western world have always tolerated satire as a means of holding the dramatic mirror up to social ills, public tyrants, governmental abuse, corrupt politicians and have taken to heart the carefully crafted solutions of play-wrights to society's ills and political extremist.

• Discrimination – George C Wolfe’s The Colored Museum• Environmental concerns – Mark Hollmann’s and Gres Kotis’

Urinetown: The Musical• In The Colored Museum, George C Wolfe utilizes the techiques of

farce and moral scrutiny of satire in his examination of African-American history and literature.

The Colored MuseumGeorge C. Wolfe

Critical introduction to The Colored Museum

• With uncompromising wit and a frenetic style, Wolfe says the unthinkable about the history and present-day contradictions of African-Americans in the USA.

• The setting is an antiseptic modern museum displaying exhibits of “colored” history, beginning with the slave trade and ending with contemporary Harlem.

• As a farceur and satirist, he sets about annihilate the audience’s politically correct responses and attitudes and set them on a path for social reform.

• “celebrity slaveship” obey a “Fatsen Shackles” seat-belt sign ”suffer a few hundred years” in exchange for receiving a “complex culture.”

Critical introduction to The Colored Museum

• Wolfe establishes the outrageous playfulness of traditional farce with personal seriousness that theater is a place for ideas and truths about society and human condition.

• The other exhibits comprise displays of contemporary African-Americans torn between cultural legacy of oppression and revolt and exigencies of lining in the present.

• A woman dressing for a date is traumatized when her two wigs atop her makeup table come to alive to debate the identity conflict they have represented in their owner’s life for 20 years.

Critical introduction to The Colored Museum

• A corporate type tries to throw the icons of his childhood into a trash can along with his inner adolescent self dressed in late sixties’ street style.

Eldridge Cleaver(31 August 1935 - 1 May

1998)

Political campaign buttons of Angela Davis

Albums by Jimi Hendrix

The Jackson Five

Critical introduction to The Colored Museum • “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play,” a play within-the-

play, in which Wolfe shatters the pretensions of black acting styles along with generational conflicts of 1950s’ black-American drama in which families are preoccupied with middle-class aspirations.

• The target is Lorraine Hansberry’s award-winning drama, A Raisin in the Sun.

• The title comes from the poem "Harlem" (also known as "A Dream Deferred") by Langston Hughes. The story is based upon a black family's experiences in the Washington Park Subdivision of Chicago's Woodlawn neighborhood.

• A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway, as well as the first play with a black director (Lloyd Richards) on Broadway.

Critical introduction to The Colored Museum

• With farcical style and satirical wit, Wolfe has torn at the fabric of racist America by revealing the cultural blind spots of blacks and whites alike: the black millionaire basketball player, soul food, sensitive family dramas, and performers.

• As music, other characters, and projected images rise up from history around Topsy, Wolfe’s intentions becomes clear; while the baggage of slavery cannot really be banished, we have been liberated from the shackles of the past by Wolfe’s fearless and sustained Freudian joke that has bypassed social taboos and cultural censors

Critical introduction to The Colored Museum

• The exhibits in Wolfe’s “colored museum” stress that we are our past, but our present-day awareness liberates us in to vital selfhood.

• The vulnerability of black identity and African-American pride to exploitation and even destruction by majority culture is the basic statement of The Colored Museum.

• That’s a manifestation of a slave mentality. Because you’re still obsessing about how the dominant culture is going to judge you and I refuse to give anybody that kind of power over my thought process and creativity.

About the Author

• George C. Wolfe was born in Frankfort, Kentucky, on September 23, 1954. As an African American, he experienced segregation in Frankfort but because of the close-knit black community, he hardly experienced much difference in the cultures. The loving attention he received from his family always assured him that he was extraordinary and special, not inferior to the predominant white people in the city. It wasn’t until Wolfe was seven that he first took racism head on. He was denied a ticket to see the Disney film 101 Dalmations at a theater in his hometown. Wolfe attended an all black private school, until his family moved him to an integrated high school, in which he felt very isolated. He couldn’t seek happiness or acceptance until he tried his hand at directing for his high school’s theatre department. Wolfe would say that he was “obsessed with theatre” and it showed on his face when he saw his first Broadway show, Hello Dolly! Since that experience, George started writing his own plays. When he graduated from high school, he furthered his education by attending Kentucky State University, and later Pomona College in Claremont, California, to study theatre.

About the Author

• At Pomona College, Wolfe wrote a number of plays and many went on to theatre festivals to win awards. When he graduated in 1976, he remained in California to teach theatre to inner city students, and to produce his plays among these artists. His time in Los Angeles taught him many life lessons that expanded his views beyond the small town where he grew up. He learned about the inner city conflicts among many peoples, including African Americans, Hispanics, Asians and homosexuals. A few years later, Wolfe packed up his life on the west coast and decided to give the east coast a chance. He relocated to the New York City and he taught theatre at City College and the Richard Allen Center for Cultural Art. At the same time, he studied at New York University and was granted his Master Degree in dramatic writing in 1983.

About the Author

• Wolfe’s musical debut off-Broadway, Paradise, was a flop; he quickly got back on his feet when The Colored Museum fell into the hands of the director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, Joseph Papp. That summer, The Colored Museum began its early run in the Public Theater. Although the critics loved the show, many patrons were offended by the controversial topics expressed in the play. Wolfe won the Dramatists’ Guild’s Elizabeth Hull-Kate Warriner Award for the best play dealing with social, religious or political topics. Following the run of The Colored Museum, Director Papp invited Wolfe to be the Public Theater’s resident director.

Synopsis• The Play• The Colored Museum satirizes the black experience in

America in the 1980’s. Although the play is controversial, its comedy is found through satirical, exaggerated images of black life. The Colored Museum accentuates the extreme stereotypes of blacks by splitting the show up into eleven vignettes, or museum exhibits.

• The exhibits include: Git on Board, Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel, The Photo Session, Soldier with a Secret, The Gospel According to Miss Roj, The Hairpiece, The Last Mama-on the-Couch Play, Symbiosis, Lala’s Opening, Permutations and The Party.

Themes and Topics to Explore• Racism• Social Recognition• Stereotypes• Storytelling• Class Distinction• Prejudice and Pain• Family Roles• Self Worth• Satire

The CharactersMiss Pat: “Git on Board”Aunt Ethel: “Cookin’ with Aunt Ethel”Guy: “The Photo Session”Girl: “The Photo Session”Junie: “A Soldier with a Secret”Miss Roj: “The Gospel According to Miss

Roj”Janine: “The Hairpiece”LaWanda: “The Hairpiece”Woman: “The Hairpiece”Narrator: “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch

Play”

Mama: “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play”

Son: “The Last Mama-on-the-Couch Play”Lady in Plaid: “The Last Mama-on-the-

Couch Play”Medea Jones: “The Last Mama-on-the-

Couch Play”Man: “Symbiosis”Kid: “Symbiosis”Lala: “Lala’s Opening”Admonia: “Lala’s Opening”Normal Jean: “Permutations”Topsy Washington: “The Party”

The Play

• Git on Board (p.287): We will be crossing the Atlantic at an altitude that’s pretty high, so you must wear your shackles at all times.

• A Soldier with a Secret(p.291): Pst, pst. • The Gospel According to Miss Roj (P.293): You can’t get no job• The Hairpiece (P.295):

– Janine: Miss hunny, please……– Lawanda: Miss Made-in-Taiwan, • The Last Mama-on the-Couch Play (P.295): - Narrator: we are pleased…..- Son: leave me alone, Medea (P.297)

The Play

• Symbiosis (p.300):• KID: Yeah. Yeah. ………• Man: The…Ice…Age…is…

• Lala’s Opening• Permutations (p.304)

• Normal: My mama used to say…..• The Party (p.305)

• Yes, child!.......South Africa

Performing The Colored Museum

• The play was performed without intermission• Village Voice “Obie” award for best new play• Very fabric of racist America• The revolt belongs not so much to Topsy but

to George C. Wolfe’s fearless humor and satire that liberate but not fully banishes the baggage of slavery, racism, and angst from American culture.

Eric Bentley from “The Psychology of Farce”• Farce, an extreme form of comedy in which laughter is raised at the

expense of probability, particularity by horseplay and bodily assault.• The function of “farcical” fantasies, in dreams or in plays, is not as

provocation but as compensation.• The main point of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents is

pertinent here: when we buy civilization, at the price of frustration, the frustrated impulses become a potential source of trouble.

• Dreams are the commonest relief but are usually unpleasant.• There are two wrong ways of playing the indirectness of farce; the

amateur way and the professional way.• But in which one had no feeling of the inordinate aggression of

Wilde against Victorian civilization, if not against all civilization.

David Savran’s Interview with George C. Wolfe (1998)

• Black people create this fantasy Africa that never existed.• So to me that’s been the goal; to try as a human being not to

choose this quality over that quality, but to try to embrace all of them.

• That’s so much what The Colored Museum was all about, “I’m not what I was ten years ago or ten minutes ago, I’m all of that and then some.”

• So I wrote The Colored Museum as a form of liberation and I said ”Now I can write any play. ”

The First Production

• Rick M. Khan: executive director of The Colored Museum’s world premier, and co-founder of the Crossroad Theatre Company.

• Lee Kenneth Richardson: artistic director of The Colored Museum’s world premier, and most recently film actor. Richardson directed at the New York Shakespeare Festival when the show first previewed.

Production History

• Premiered at the Crossroad Theatre Company on March 26, 1986.

• Previewed at Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival on October 7, 1986

NKU’s Corbett Theatre

Directed by Brian Robertson

• From left, LaTonia Phipps, Derric Harris, Inga Ballard, Timothy Ware, Tiffany Jewel in The Colored Museum. October 2, 2008

The Colored Museum by George C. WolfeDirected by Sheila RamseySet by David RussellCostumes by Katherine Mitchell

The Colored Museum Photo Gallery 2006-2007 University Theatre

• Gene Perry made musical contributions to Colored Museum both directed by Dr. Floyd Gaffney of the University of California San Diego Department of Theatre.

• During The Colored Museum, Gene was visible throughout the play using Afro-Caribbean sounds. He opened the play with bomba and plena rhythms

• The Colored Museum 1996 at Brown University

Macalester College Theater and Dance Department Presents“The Colored Museum” by George C. WolfeSeptember 26, 27, 28, and October 2, 3, 4

San Jose States Department of RTVF presents "The Colored Museum "

Revisiting farce and Satire• Farce and satire have entertained theater

audiences for centuries. There are elements of both found in most comedies ranging from Ben Johnson’s Volpone to Michael Frayn’s Noises Off.

• Volpone (Italian for "The Big Fox") is a comedy by Ben Jonson first produced in 1606, drawing on elements of city comedy, black comedy and animal fable.

• A merciless satire of greed and lust, it remains Jonson's most-performed play, and it is among the finest Jacobean comedies.

Revisiting farce and satire• Noises Off is a 1982 play by English

playwright Michael Frayn. The idea for it was born in 1970, when Frayn was standing in the wings watching a performance of Chinamen, a farce that he had written for Lynn Redgrave.

• According to the playwright, "It was funnier from behind than in front and I thought that one day I must write a farce from behind.“

• The prototype, a short-lived one-act play entitled Exits, was written and performed in 1977. At the request of associate Michael Codron, Frayn expanded the play into what would become Noises Off.

Revisiting farce and satire

• Farce is a clever, physical variation on humorous activities growing out of social situations.

• Farce has its serious side, expresses our darkest secrets and fantasies.

• As Topsy Washinton sings optimistically of the “power in her madness and in her colored contradictions,” she embodies the fantasies and contradictions that farce best exemplifies in its knock-about antics.

• Reexamination of African-American history and literature.

Revisiting farce and satire

• In modern times, farce and satire have achieved unlooked-for complexities.

• Farce has expressed the endless variations on an absurd existence without purpose or meaning, or it has taken on the absurdities of the historical process, or it has tackled the icons of the dominant popular culture to test ideas within a theatrical form that permits variations on social history without ham or reprisal.

• Tragicomedy is not a subform of comedy. Writers of tragicomedy blend ideas, moods, and elements of tragedy and comedy in the creation of a third mode of writing, dominant for the second half of the 20th century.

Clips

• Directed By: AMINI J. COURTS • Starring: DOUG GOLDMAN As: MISS ROJ • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQdkSQkaVVo• People's Theatre production. Orlando Fl• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzS9AK8vr3c• Dir. George C. Wolfe• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kjzwukWUco