The Modern Theater

CHAPTER 8

Subtopics:• Realism

Laboratory

Pioneers

Naturalism• Antirealism

Symbolist Rebellion

Era of Isms

Stylized Theatre

( French Avant-Garde:Ubu Roi ; Expressionism:Hairy Ape ; Metatheatre:Six Characters in Search of an Author ; Theatre of Cruelty:Jet of Blood ; Philosophical Melodrama:No Exit ; Theatre of the Absurd:Waiting for Godot ; Theater of Alienation: The Good Person of Szechuan ; Comedy of Contemporary Manners:Bedroom Farce ; Political Sattire:Serious Money)

Realism

• The movement that has had the most pervasive and long-lived effect on modern theater• It has sought to create drama without conventions or abstractions• Likeness to life is realism’s goal, and in pursuit of that goal it has renounced, among other things, idealized or prettified settings, versifications, contrived endings, and stylized costumes and performances

• It 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 which to approach the reality of existence. Instead of having actors represent characters, the realists would say, let us have the actors be those characters. Instead of having dialogue that is conversation. Instead of having scenery or costumes that convey a sense of time and place and atmosphere, let us have scenery that is genuinely inhabitable and costumes that are real clothes.

• Realism has its limits: any dramatic piece must inevitably involve a certain shaping and stylization, no matter how lifelike its effect, and advocates of theatrical realism are well aware of this inevitability.•Nevertheless, the ideology of realism was tested during the last years of 19th century and first years of the 20th, in every aspect of theater– acting, directing, design, playwriting– and the results of those tests form a body of theatre that is both valid and meaningful and a style that remains enormously significant.

Laboratory

• The setting is to resemble the prescribed locale of the play as closely as possible; indeed, it is not unusual for the much of the scenery to be acquired from the real life environment and transported to the theatre. Costumes worn by the characters in the realistic theatre follow the dress of “real” people similar societal status; dialogue re-creates the cadences and expressions of daily life.

• Early on the realist movement, the proscenium stage was modified to accommodate scenery constructed in box sets, with the walls given full dimension and with real bookcases, windows, fireplaces, swinging doors and so forth built into the walls just as they are in a house interior. In the same vein, realistic acting was judge 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.

• A new aesthetic principle was spawned: the “theatre of the fourth wall removed” in which the life onstage was conceived to be the same as life in a real world setting, except that, in the case of the stage, one wall—the proscenium opening—had been removed.• Realism presents its audience with an abundance of seemingly real-life “evidence” and permits each spectator to arrive at his own conclusion.

• It encourages us to delve into the mystery that lies beneath–for the exploration of life’s mystery is the true, though perhaps unspoken, purpose of every realistic play.• Its characters, like people in life, are defined by detail rather than by symbol or abstract idealization; like people we know they are ultimately unpredictable and humanly comlex rather than ideologically absolute.

Pioneers of Realism

• In France, realistic drama was introduced in the 1850’s by Alexandre Dumas fils and Emile Augier, who treated such contemporary issues as the rights of the of the illegitimate children and the influence of the church in politics. They always defended accepted moral standards and did little to disturb the prejudices of their audiences.• Henrik Ibsen shocked the audiences so deeply that he came to be considered the father of modern theater. Although his subjects did not differ greatly from Dumas and Augier, he was the most controversial playwright of the period because he always questioned accepted social conventions and moral standards.

• In England, George Bernard Shaw made drama a vehicle for discussion and ideas. Shaw differ from Ibsen in writing comedies, rather than serious plays in which he discredited accepted prejudices. Then was John Galsworthy, the most popular realists in England. He used the stage to show up injustice and human follies.• In Germany, Gerhart Hauptmann brought new life to drama with his realistic plays which emphasized the plight of workers.• In Austria, Arthur Schnitzler, a doctor by profession, brought the objectivity of his consulting room to plays.

• In Russia, Nikolai Gogol began the trend toward realism with his comedy on Russian provincial life and government corruption. The first realistic play to focus on the mental and emotional lives of the characters was made by Ivan Turgenev. The great period of Russian theater is usually to have began with the Moscow Art Theater and the plays of Anton Chekov which depicts great compassion to the aimless lives of ineffectual characters.

Naturalism

•While realism was gaining acceptance, another more demanding approach to writing, called naturalism, was developing in France.• Naturalism represents an extreme attempt to dramatize human reality without the appearance of dramaturgical shaping.• Emile Zola was their chief theoretician. The naturalists based their aesthetics on nature, particularly humanity’s place in the natural environment. To them, human beings were merely biological phenomena whose behavior was determined entirely by genetic and social circumstances.

• To portray a character as a hero, or even as a credible force for change in a society, was anathema to the naturalists who similarly eschewed dramatic conclusions or climates. Whereas realist plays at that time tended to deal with well defined social issues– women’s rights, inheritance laws, etc. • The characters of the play were the plays’ entire subject; any topical issues that arose served merely to facilitate the interplay of personalities and highlight the characters’ situations, frustrations, and hopes.

• Naturalism is not merely a matter of style; it is a philosophical concept concerning the nature of the human animal. And naturalist theater represents a purposeful attempt to explore that concept, using extreme realism as its basic dramaturgy.

Antirealism

• Realism and naturalism were not the only new movements of the late 19th century to make themselves strongly felt in the modern theatre. A counterforce, equally powerful, was to emerge. First manifest in the movement known as symbolism, this counterforce evolved and expanded into what we will call antirealistic theater which moved across Europe and quickly began contesting the advances of realism step-by-step.

The Symbolist Rebellion

• The symbolist movement began in Paris during the 1880’s as a joint venture of artists, playwrights, essayists, critics, sculptors, and poets. If realism was the art of depicting reality as ordinary man and women might see it, symbolism would explore– by means of images and metaphors--- the inner realities that cannot be directly or literally perceived.• Symbolic characters, therefore, would not represent real human beings but instead would symbolize philosophical ideals or warring internal forces in the human for the artist soul.

• Symbolism has another goal as well: to crush what its adherents deemed to be spiritually bankrupt realism and to replace it with traditional aesthetic values—poetry, imagery, novelty, fantasy, extravagance, profundity, audacity, charm, and superhuman magnitude. United in their hatred for literal detail and for all they considered mundane and ordinary. 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 symbolists’ aim, and self –conscious creative innovation was to be their primary accomplishment.

• The symbolist believed that those things one can observe directly—the primary concern of the realists and naturalists are important. The major symbolist playwrights were Maurice Maeterlink.

The Era of Isms

• The first third of the 20th century, indeed was not an era of theatrical isms, an era with continued experimentation by movements self-consciously seeking to redefine theatrical art. • Ism theater sprang out like mushrooms, each with its own fully articulated credo and manifesto, each promising a better art—if not indeed, a better world. It was a vibrant era for the theater, for out of this welter of isms, the aesthetics on dramatic art took on a new social and political significance in the cultural capitals of Europe and America. A successful play was not merely a play but rather a forum for a cause, and behind that cause was a body of zealous supporters and adherents who shared a deep aesthetic commitment.

Stylized Theater

• Anti realistic theater attempts to create new formats, not merely to enhance the portrayal of human existence but also to disclose fundamental patterns underlying that existence: patterns of perception, patterns of association, patterns of personal and environmental interaction. The styles employed by this modern theater come from anywhere and everywhere from the past, from exotic cultures, and from present and future technologies. The modern theater artist has an unprecedented reservoir of sources to draw upon and is generally unconstrained in their application by political edict, religious prohibition, or mandated artistic tradition.

• The modern stylized theater is undoubtedly the freest in the history: the dramatist, director, actor, or designer is limited only by physical resources and individual imagination. Almost anything can be put upon the stage, and in the 20th century it seems that everything was.• Anti realistic theater does not altogether dispense with reality but wields it in often unexpected ways and freely enhances it with symbols and metaphor, striving to elucidate by parable and allegory, to deconstruct and reconstruct by language, scenery, and lighting.

• Further, it makes explicit use of the theaters’ very theatrically, frequently reminding its audience members, directly or indirectly, that they are watching a performance, not an episode in somebody’s daily life.

The French Avant-Garde: Ubu Roi• The opening of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi (King Ubu) at the Theatre de l’Oeuvre in Paris on December 10, 1896 was perhaps the most violent dramatic premiere in theater history: the audience shouted, whistled, hooted, cheered, threw things, and shook their fists at the stage. Duels were even fought after subsequent performances. The avant-garde was born.• The term avant-garde comes from the military, where it refers to the advance battalion, or the “shock troops” that initiate a major assault. In France, the term initially described the wave of French playwrights and directors who openly and boldly assaulted realism in the first four decades of the 2oth century. Today the term is used worldwide to describe any adventurous, experimental, and nontraditional artistic efforts.

• Surrealism, a word that means “beyond realism” or super realism was officially inaugurated by Andre Breton in 1924 but can be said to date from Alfred Jarry’s play– which advocates claim, reaches a superior level of reality by tracing the unconscious processes of the mind rather than the literal depictions of observable life.

Expressionism: The Hairy Ape• Of all the isms, expressionism is the one that has given rise to the most significant body of modern theatre, probably because of its broad definition and its seeming alliance with expressionism in the visual arts.• The theatrical expressionism that was much in vogue in Germany during the first decades of the 20th century featured shocking and gutsy dialogue, boldly exaggerated scenery, piercing sounds, bright lights, an abundance of primary colors, a not very subtle use of symbols, and a structure of short, stark, jabbing scenes that built to a power (and usually deafening) climax.

• Eugene O’Neill, who had began as a realistic playwright in the previous decades, wrote a play that became a landmark of expressionist theater in 1921. O’Neills’ 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 eventually crazed; he dies at play’s end in the monkey cage of a zoo.

Metatheater: Six Characters in Search of an Author

• First produced in 1921, Six Characters in Search of an Author expressess from its famous title onward a “metatheatrical” motif by which the theater itself becomes part of the content of play production, not merely the vehicle.• In this play, Luigi Pirandello explores how the stage is also a world– and how the stage and the world, illusion and reality, relate to each other. In this still-stunning play, a family of dramatic “characters”—a father, his stepdaughter, a mother, and her children—appear as if by magic on the “stage” of a provincial theatre where a new play by Pirandello is being rehearsed.

• The characters, claiming they have an unfinished play in them, 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 continually shifting perceptions, for clearly a play-within-the play is involved, but which is the real play and which the real life?• There are actors playing actors, actors playing “characters”, and actors playing “actors-playing-characters”; there are also scenes when the actors playing “characters” are making fun of the actors playing actors playing – “characters”.

Theater of Cruelty: Jet of Blood• Anton Artaud was one of drama’s greatest revolutionaries, although his performance lies more in his ideas and influence than in his actual theatrical achievements.• The theater envisaged by Artaud was a self-declared theater of cruelty for in his words, “without an element of cruelty at root of every performance, the theater is not possible”. The “cruel” theater would flourish.• His one published play, Jet of Blood, illustrates both the radically anti realistic nature of his dramaturgy and the difficulties that would be encountered in its production.

Philosophical Melodrama: No Exit• No exit is one of the most compelling short plays ever written. In this one-act fantasy written in 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre, a well known French existentialist philosopher, establishes a unique “Hell”, which is a room without windows or mirrors. • No exit is a classic dramatic statement of existentialism, of which Sartre was the 2oth century’s leading exponent. Each character in the play carries with him some baggage of guilt and expectation, each seeks from another some certification of final personal worth, and each is endlessly thwarted in this quest. We are all condemned to revolved around each other in frustratingly incomplete accord, suggests Sartre; we are all forced to reckon with the impossibility of finding meaning in the unrelated events that constitutes life.

Theater of the Absurd: Waiting for Godot

• Theater of the Absurd, coined by Martin Isslin, 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 Albert Camus. • 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 theatrically through a deliberate and self conscious flaunting of the “absurd”—in the sense of the ridiculous.

Theater of Alienation:The Good Person of Szechuan

• It highlights the essential futility of human endeavors, the prazzling social engaged theater 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.

Comedy of Contemporary Manners: Bedroom Farce

• In America, Neil Simon has for four decades exhibited enormous talent and success as a writer of light comedy for the stage and in England, Alan Ayckbourn has demonstrated comparable skill at the form. His Bedroom Farce wsa first produced in 1975 by the Library Theater in Scarborough England.

• Bedroom Farce is an ingenius comedy of current manners, novel in its dramatic structure and reasonably true to life in its concerns.

Political Satire: Serious Money• Caryl Churchill has been a unique exemplar of socially conscious dramatic sattire since 1970’s, with trenchant and brilliantly innovative works on a wide variety of issues: sexual orientations and their attendant prejudices and hypocrisis, gender discrimination throughout history, British-american attractions and antipathies, and the post cold war chaos in Eastern Europe.• In Serious Money, Churchill employs a racy rhyming verse –in an exceptional glib patter that lies somewhere between e.e. cummings and gangsta rap– to explore the vagaries of arbitrage stock trading on the London market and of international finance.