Western Drama through the Ages Two Volumes : A Student Reference Guide

Western Drama through the Ages: A Student Reference Guide, Volumes 1 & 2

Edited by Kimball King

Greenwood Press

WESTERN DRAMA THROUGH THE AGES

WESTERN DRAMA THROUGH THE AGES A Student Reference Guide




VOLUME 1

Edited by Kimball King

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Western drama through the ages : a student reference guide / edited by Kimball King. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32934-0 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32935-7 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32936-4 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) 1. Drama—History and criticism. 2. Theater—History. I. King, Kimball. PN1721.W47 2007 809.2—dc22 2007010683 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2007 by Kimball King All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007010683 ISBN-10: 0–313–32934–6 (set) ISBN-13: 978–0–313–32934–0 (set) 0–313–32935–4 (vol. 1) 978–0–313–32935–7 (vol. 1) 0–313–32936–2 (vol. 2) 978–0–313–32936–4 (vol. 2) First published in 2007 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


Contents

VOLUME 1 Preface

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Part I: Four Great Eras of Western Drama Classic Greek and Roman Drama Brett M. Rogers English Renaissance Drama William Kerwin French Neoclassical Drama Andrew Ade Modern Drama Kimball King

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Part II: Two Other Major Eras of Western Drama Medieval Drama Edward Donald Kennedy Restoration Drama John M. Ware Part III: National and Regional Theater Modern Canadian Theater Jerry Wasserman Czech Drama Veronika Ambros

3 30 47 71 79 81 95 125 127 142

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Contents German Drama Christoph E. Schweitzer Modern Indian Drama Sitanshi Talati-Parikh Irish Drama Richard Rankin Russell Italian Drama Ennio Italo Rao Latin American Theater George Woodyard Polish Theater Artur Grabowski Russian Drama in the Eighteenth Century Lurana Donnels O’Malley The Russian Drama of Anton Chekhov Ralph Lindheim Modern Scandinavian Drama Katherine Egerton Southern U.S. Drama Catherine Seltzer Spanish Drama Jeffrey T. Bersett VOLUME 2 Part IV: Theater Movements and Issues African American Drama Kay E.B. Ruth Belief in Contemporary Drama Gerald C. Wood Biblical Drama in Britain and America Martha Greene Eads Gay Drama James Fisher Gender and Theater Gwendolyn N. Hale Musical Theater Gary Konas Outdoor Drama Eszter A. Julian

154 161 177 187 201 209 239 243 257 268 275

289 291 302 314 332 350 357 366

Contents Part V: Dramatic Genres and Styles Dada in Drama Sarah Bay-Cheng Dramatic Comedy Miriam M. Chirico Dramatic Comedy: A History of European and American Plays Reade Dornan Expressionism Robert F. Gross ‘‘In Yer Face’’ Theater: ‘‘Purely through Image’’ and the Collapse of Language Luc Gilleman Kitchen Sink Drama Reade Dornan Language in Play: From ‘‘Well-Made’’ and Absurdist Plays to Talk Drama Luc Gilleman ‘‘Oh, die Angst! die Angst!’’ Romeo and Juliet as Rock Opera William Hutchings The Primal Power in Harold Pinter and Edward Albee: The American Dream Destructed Penelope Prentice Realism Robert F. Gross Realism: A Survey of Modern Plays Bruce Mann Surrealism Robert F. Gross Tragedy Kimball King Part VI: Theatrical Essentials Acting Styles Julie Fishell Costume Design in the United States Bobbi Owen Directors and Directing Styles Kimball King Dramaturgy Karen Blansfield Drama’s Stages: Theaters and Playhouses in Theatrical History Milly S. Barranger

377 379 391 414 425 440

452 454

462 474

485 504 507 521 525 527 533 538 541 546

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Contents Theater Voice Coaching Bonnie N. Raphael

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Editor and Contributors

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Preface

SCOPE Western Drama through the Ages: A Student Reference Guide is an overview of drama designed to reveal the density of the theatrical experience, primarily in Western countries from America and Europe to India. An interested reader can follow the trajectory of the theater from its beginnings to the present, understand the contributions of many countries and societies within those countries, and feel prepared to analyze plays in a more knowledgeable, sophisticated way. Drama is one of the most ‘‘social’’ of the arts, in that people generally attend plays with others and discuss the work afterward. Furthermore, it is possible to see a play without advance preparation. One need only to pursue further studies of the works one enjoys the most. This guide surveys materials from about 500 years before the birth of Christ and attempts to present major theatrical developments up to the present day. It presents forty-five essays by thirty-nine contributors, many who are internationally acknowledged experts in their respective fields. Certain decisions, which I believe were the correct ones, were made about these volumes. First, I wanted as many theater authorities as possible to write about their specialties. My intention was that each author would express his or her own viewpoint, even prejudices, which may have been gained from years of intense study of a subject. The heartfelt essay has always seemed to me more valuable than the homogenized version that attempts to please readers of all persuasions (and generally fails to do so). Also, too often theatrical techniques are

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Preface overlooked in drama reference works. Essays by people working in the theater today comment effectively on the acting styles, costumes, directing, dramaturgy, stage design, and voice training. Second, and most of all, I wanted this guide to be readable. I wanted anyone interested in plays to find descriptions of works or authors that were honest and informative. Certainly I hope that college students will find this volume useful, and I also hope to interest fledgling students, say those in high school, who are just beginning to appreciate the appeal of staged materials. I also wish general theatergoers and readers of dramatic literature to use this volume when they want to gain insight into a particular issue or a dramatic movement or concept, or a national or international dramatic contribution.

ARRANGEMENT Western Drama through the Ages: A Student Reference Guide begins with four categories which the late Professor John Gassner, unquestionably a great theater authority, has called the major eras of dramatic history: Classical Drama, Renaissance Drama, French Neoclassical Drama, and Modern Drama. Two other eras, Medieval Drama and Restoration Drama, are discussed next. The third section of this volume is to me notable: a selection of essays on national and regional dramas, usually discussing major plays and dramatists over the centuries in these countries. I wish, of course, that it would have been possible to include the theatrical history of every country, but it was necessary to limit the analyses. One notices immediately that neither American nor British drama is listed specifically in the section on national drama. It seemed redundant to create such sections when chapters on African American theater, Pinter’s and Albee’s plays, biblical drama, gay drama, musical theater, Southern U.S. drama, and outdoor drama—among others—mention almost entirely American or British plays. Most of the essays in this section have been researched in depth by some of the world’s most distinguished scholars, such as Professor Christoph Schweitzer on German drama, Professor George Woodyard on Latin American Drama, and Professor Jerry Wasserman on modern Canadian theater. Professors Grabowski on Polish drama, Ambros on Czechoslovakian theater, O’Malley on eighteenth century Russian drama, Lindheim on Chekhov, and Rao on Italian drama are also known for their expertise. The fourth section includes an interesting mixture of movements and issues within the theater, including African American drama, biblical drama and contemporary drama that grapples with spiritual belief in society, gay theater, issues of gender and theater, musical theater, and outdoor drama. The fifth section, on important genres and styles, primarily of modern drama, ranges from discussions of comedy and tragedy to such types of modern drama

Preface as realism; surrealism; ‘‘in yer face’’ theater, which forces playgoers to confront violence and psychological problems of our times; the theater of the absurd; and more. A few modern playwrights, Edward Albee and Harold Pinter, the late Sarah Kane, Neil LaBute, and others, are discussed. The final section of essays comprises an examination of theater in practice. Experienced professionals who have taught and worked in the areas of their essays have written on directing, acting, voice coaching, dramaturgy, costume design, and stages in theaters and playhouses.

FEATURES Each essay includes a list of further reading, resources that will provide reading lists for those who wish to pursue a particular topic or national dramatic history. The volume closes with a general bibliography that I and most of the other scholars who contributed to this guide have studied, and a comprehensive index, so that readers may research the many details available to them in the entries. No book on a field as rich and varied as the drama can cover every issue that might satisfy every reader. However, I believe that Western Drama through the Ages: A Student Reference Guide presents the most comprehensive, readerfriendly study of dramatic adventure available today. All the materials herein have been presented sincerely and thoughtfully. I believe the many contributors and I have presented a source of reading pleasure about important dramatic considerations for years to come.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish first of all to thank Robert Gross, who has been my muse throughout this project and who offered constant encouragement, suggested formatting, and contributed three articles to the project. I appreciated the gracious permission of Jackson Bryer to draw upon his own research on drama. Milly Barranger, the retired chair of the Dramatic Arts Department at my university, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, contributed a piece to this volume, and she and Mckay Coble, the current chair, pointed me in the right direction. Barranger, Bonnie Raphael, Karen Blansfield, Bobbie Owen and Julie Fishell, all member of UNC’s Dramatic Arts department, contributed essays as well. Many thanks to Thomas Fahy and Lois Gordon for their encouragement in what seemed at times a daunting task. George Butler at Greenwood Press and Anne Thompson, also a Greenwood editor, deserve praise for their forbearance and supervision. All of my contributors have my gratitude. Finally, Mrs. Nina Wallace, who has over the years typed countless articles and books for me, provided exemplary aid at every turn.

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PART I

Four Great Eras of Western Drama


Classic Greek and Roman Drama Brett M. Rogers

INTRODUCTION Classical drama presents us with a terrible paradox. On the one hand, the characters of tragedy—such notables as blind Oedipus, vengeful Medea, defiant Antigone—are familiar to modern readers of classical mythology, Shakespearean tragedy, Freudian psychoanalysis, or the poetry of W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. No less familiar are the basic plots found in many classical tragedies and comedies—tales of the violation of social boundaries, of the rise and fall of individuals both noble and humble. Nevertheless, despite its near ubiquitous presence in modern Western culture, classical drama is equally an encounter with the strange, an engagement with a foreign world whose practices we no longer follow and whose values we rarely share. A vast gulf separates us from classical Athens (490–323 B.C.), the Roman Republic (509–30 B.C.), and the Roman Empire (30 B.C.–476 A.D.), to which time and place virtually all surviving classical drama belongs. Moreover, in classical antiquity drama was not ‘‘theater’’ in any modern sense, but a form of religious song offered in festivals lasting several days; in the case of classical Athens, drama also functioned as a kind of civic performance wherein poets and actors sought recognition and glory from their audience, their fellow Athenian citizens. The fact that classical drama is both totally familiar and utterly foreign leaves us in a paradoxical situation: how might we learn to read these familiar dramas through new eyes? How might we take hold of what we have previously learned about classical drama, set it aside temporarily, and instead imagine ourselves as members of the Athenian or Roman audience immersed in

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Western Drama through the Ages the ancient dramatic experience? Only when we confront this paradox can we begin to discern the spirit of classical drama, to recognize its stunning complexity and awe-inspiring beauty, and to understand why classical drama has wielded an immeasurable influence on the ensuing 2,300 years of the Western dramatic and literary traditions.

WHAT IS CLASSICAL DRAMA? Any discussion of classical drama must begin by asking what we mean when we use the word drama. We often take for granted the definition of drama, but drama can mean several quite different things. For example, consider all the various meanings drama might have in a video store. First of all, drama refers to a category used to classify movies; in this instance, drama indicates ‘‘a serious narrative,’’ as opposed to other categories like comedy (a humorous narrative), action (an exciting narrative), or foreign (a narrative in another language). When a serious narrative takes a turn for the worse, it can mean something even more specific, ‘‘a narrative leading to catastrophe,’’ ‘‘a tragedy.’’ It comes as no surprise that film adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragedies, which often end in murder and death, are found in the drama section of video stores (although we might expect them to show up in the action section instead). Yet even this Shakespearean example reminds us that drama also means ‘‘a prose or verse composition that can be adapted for stage performance,’’ as in the title of the very book you are reading now, Western Drama Through the Ages. According to this definition, we might say that everything in our video store counts as drama, including comedies, musicals, and independent films, since all of these productions start out as written compositions and are performed on some kind of stage (be it a stage in an official theater, a sound stage in Hollywood, or a scene staged in the middle of park). Yet drama does not necessarily refer to a narrative or an artistic composition, but can even mean ‘‘an event that elicits emotional response.’’ If two people in our video store are trying to choose a movie for rental and in the process one of them argues with the other’s choice perhaps too hysterically, the other person may accuse the first person of being a ‘‘drama queen’’ for making too much fuss out of an insignificant event. Drama thus encompasses a remarkably broad number of distinct, although related, concepts in English. While ancient Greek and Roman drama touches upon all of these meanings of drama (a tragedy, a composition for the stage, or an emotionally evocative event), the very word drama, which comes from the ancient Greek language, means something slightly but significantly different. In Greek drama means ‘‘deed,’’ ‘‘action,’’ and consequently ‘‘performance,’’ and derives from the Greek verb dran, ‘‘to do.’’ The fact that drama means ‘‘action’’ reminds us, who usually encounter classical dramas in scripts and books, of the original production context of these tragedies and comedies, performed onstage and in front of an audience. While drama

Classic Greek and Roman Drama emphasizes the action performed onstage in a classical drama, the language used to describe the audience emphasizes the importance of viewing drama. English audience derives from Latin audio (to hear, to listen) and stresses only the auditory experience, whereas in Greek the audience members are called theatai (viewers), which stresses the visual experience of viewing drama. Moreover, theatai shares the same root thea- (see, view) with the word theatron (viewing-place), from which comes English theater. In defining drama and theater in terms of ‘‘action’’ and ‘‘viewing,’’ we modern readers of classical drama face the challenge of both imagining away the static words we read on the page and imagining instead the visual experience of viewing action performed onstage. It is important to note that when we define drama as ‘‘action’’ this does not mean drama is ‘‘an exciting narrative’’ featuring the violence and murder found in modern action films. Despite their frequently violent plots, Greek dramas never showed such violence to the viewing audience. To choose one prominent example, in Sophocles’s famous tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus (often known by its Latin title Oedipus Rex or the English translation Oedipus the King), Oedipus has already killed his father and committed incest with his mother long before the beginning of the drama. Nor does Oedipus blind himself onstage, in front of the eyes of the audience, but he does so offstage, leaving the horror and impiety of his self-blinding to the imagination or ‘‘mind’s eye’’ of audiences. The audience never actually views the actions of murder and blinding, but only witnesses the reports of such actions and the suffering that results. To be sure, some forms of classical drama did feature varying degrees of violence (such as Greek and Roman comedy, mime, and Roman pantomime), but the point remains that the term drama does not by definition require such excitement and classical Greek drama certainly avoided such violence. The study of classical drama therefore not only requires us to think in terms of what we can see, but also prompts us to consider what we cannot, in fact, see.

WHAT IS ANCIENT GREEK DRAMA? Ancient Greek drama consists of three kinds of plays: tragedy, satyr-drama, and comedy. The first tragedies are said to have been performed in 534 B.C. at the festival of Dionysus (the City or Great Dionysia) in Athens; satyr-dramas were added in 502 or 501 B.C., and comedies were first officially produced in Athens in 486 B.C. Greek drama flourished in Athens in the fifth century B.C. under such dramatists as the tragic poets Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as the comic poet Aristophanes. Greek drama remained popular into the fourth and third centuries B.C. in the hands of such dramatists as the comic poet Menander. While Athens appears to have been the primary locus of dramatic activity in classical Greece, comedies were also performed from the beginning of the fifth century B.C. onward in Syracuse (on the island of Sicily, home to numerous Greek

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Western Drama through the Ages colonies), and some tragic poets are known to have travelled and produced dramas in places like Sicily and Macedonia (north of Greece). Only forty-five ancient Greek dramas survive complete today—thirty-two tragedies, one satyrdrama, and twelve comedies—as well as a multitude of fragments of drama, ranging in length from one word to several hundred lines; these fragments have been preserved in various literary sources and on the scraps of papyrus discovered in the last two centuries in the dry sands of Egypt. The origins of ancient Greek drama generate a problem that resists straightforward answer, in part due to the paucity of evidence available to us. No source offers a continuous narrative about the development and production of drama until some two centuries after the first tragedies were produced in 534 B.C. Nor is it easy to glean information from the dramatic texts themselves, since the earliest surviving drama to which we can assign a date is Aeschylus’s tragedy Persians, performed in 472 B.C., sixty-two years after the first tragedies. Some information comes from fragmentary inscriptions found in the theater of Dionysus in Athens; these inscriptions contain records reaching back as far as 502 or 501 B.C. (at which time the City Dionysia was reorganized), but they do nothing more than list the names of the producer (choregos) and poet who were victorious in the annual dramatic competitions. Scattered remarks in literary sources dating to the late fifth century B.C. onward also offer information, but these sources too are woefully incomplete. Much of our knowledge about the origins of drama comes from the philosopher and scholar Aristotle (384–322 B.C.), whose Poetics provides the earliest surviving and fullest account of the origins of Greek poetry, including in his discussion tragedy, satyr-drama, and comedy. According to Aristotle, tragedy developed out of a species of choral poetry known as dithyramb. Choral poetry refers to a tradition of songs performed by a dancing collective or choros (chorus) of several men, young men, or young women, dating back to the seventh century B.C. (if not much earlier). In the case of dithyramb, a chorus of either fifty men or fifty young boys performed the songs specifically in honor of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine who was associated with such activities as male fertility and ecstatic worship. Aristotle claims that tragedy developed out of the preludes of dithyramb, when the chorus leader who started the dithyramb (called the exarchon) became a distinct character, separate from the rest of the chorus and speaking in dialogue with them—a point reflected in the Greek word for actor, hypokriteˆs, which literally means answerer (and which only later attained the pejorative meaning found in its English descendant hypocrite). Our sources credit several poets with the invention of tragedy, including a dithyrambic poet Arion and the tragic poet Thespis. Thespis is traditionally named as the victor of the first dramatic competition in 534 B. C. and thus the father of drama (hence actors are also referred to as thespians).

Classic Greek and Roman Drama The origin of comedy faces far greater obscurity. While Aristotle’s account of tragic and epic poetry survives in the first book of the Poetics, his account of comic poetry, which Aristotle promises will comprise the second book of the Poetics, does not survive today, if it was ever written at all. Aristotle also says in the first book of the Poetics that the history of comedy had been forgotten, although he nevertheless proceeds to offer several possible sources for comedy: a Dorian tradition of poetry either from Megara on the Greek mainland or Sicilian Megara (known for one Epicharmus, a composer of comic mimes); mysterious ‘‘phallic songs,’’ of which we know nothing; and invective poetry composed in iambic trimeter known as iambos. Aristotle’s account suggests that we might think of Greek drama not just as drama but also as poetry, and prompts us to consider Greek drama in relation to other forms of Greek poetry, to dithyramb and choral poetry, as well as to the epic poetry of Homer, the didactic poetry of Hesiod, and the lyric poetry (that is, poetry accompanied by the lyre) of such figures as Archilochus and Sappho. Greek drama’s relationship to epic seems especially important, not only because Aristotle claims elsewhere in the Poetics that some epic poets were drawn to compose tragic poetry, but because many dramas utilize the same stories and plots—the same muthoi (myths)—as does Greek epic poetry. The tragic poet Sophocles is described in one source as ‘‘most Homeric,’’ while another source records that Aeschylus himself is said to have referred to his tragedies as ‘‘slices of the feast of Homer.’’ The comedy of Aristophanes also draws on the traditional muthoi of Greek poetry, although often to comic or satirical effect. In Peace (421 B.C.), Aristophanes takes the mythical ascent of the Greek hero Bellerophon, who rode into the heavens on the back of the winged horse Pegasus, and parodies this mythical journey by having his protagonist, Trygaeus, ride up to heaven on the back of a gigantic dung beetle. It is incumbent upon the modern reader of ancient Greek drama, then, to view drama as choral poetry with epic themes, or, more generally, as a manifestation of Greek traditional poetry. While Aristotle is right to locate the origins of drama in Greek poetry, some scholars have doubted other facets of the account in the Poetics and have looked to other sources of evidence. Aristotle passes over the most likely source for the genre of comedy (called komoidia in Greek), the scurrilous poetry sung by a komos or band of revelers wandering festively through town at night; notably, the komos was also part of the festivities surrounding the City Dionysia. As for tragedy, the historian Herodotus alludes to the possible existence of tragic choruses performed by the people of Sicyon in honor of the sufferings of Adrastos, a legendary king of Sicyon; only later were the choruses transferred to honor Dionysus by the tyrant Cleisthenes of Sicyon (c. 575–550 B.C.), well before the first dramatic competition in Athens. The connection between tragic choruses, Dionysian worship, and a tyrant is suggestive, if only because it evokes a similar connection that exists in

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Western Drama through the Ages the Athenian version of the origin of drama. If the alleged date of the first dramatic competition in Athens (534 B. C.) is accurate, this means that drama was first produced during the tyranny of Peisistratus (546–527 B.C.), under whose rule the arts first flourished in Athens. Some scholars press further a politically charged origin for Greek drama, and claim drama as a civic, even democratic, poetic form. One line of thought holds that drama only began in Athens around 502 or 501 B.C., at which time the City Dionysia was reorganized and to which time period belong the first dramatic victories found on the inscriptions from the theater of Dionysus. These scholars see Athenian drama as a direct response to a specific political event, the transformation of Athens into a radical democracy in 507 B.C., after the Athenians sent the tyrant Hippias (son of Peisistratus, ruled 527–510 B.C.) into exile and rebuffed a Spartan attempt to install a new tyrant. In this view, it is critical that Greek drama was performed at the City Dionysia, a festival honoring of Dionysus Eleuthereus, ‘‘Dionysus who brings freedom’’—in this case, freedom from political oppression. Even if Greek drama originally did belong to the period of the tyranny of Peisistratos and therefore antedated the rise of the Athenian democracy, it is still possible that citizens of fifth century democratic Athens ignored the origins of Greek drama and re-interpreted these performances as civic, political, and democratic events.

The Performance of Ancient Greek Drama In classical Athens, Greek dramas were performed primarily at festivals honoring the god Dionysus: the Rural or Lesser Dionysia, held in early January; the Lenaia or festival in honor of Dionysus Lenaios in late January; finally, the aforementioned City or Great Dionysia in honor of Dionysus Eleuthereus in late March. Because the stormy winters in Greece prevented travel and trade by sea, the Rural Dionysia and Lenaia were locals-only festivals for the Athenians, whereas the more moderate spring climate helped make the City Dionysia something of an international occasion, drawing visitors from throughout Greece. The weather conditions surrounding these festivals might actually explain at least one particular feature of comedy in the fifth century B.C. (what is commonly called Old Comedy), its highly topical nature, delighting in ad hominem attacks and inside jokes—namely, the kind of humor that only the local Athenian audience would understand. Notably, the Rural Dionysia and Lenaia featured comic performances only (although tragedies without satyr-dramas were eventually added to the Lenaia in the 430s B.C.), while the City Dionysia showcased a wide variety of dithyrambic, comic, and tragic performances as early as 486 B.C. (when comedy was officially added to the festival). In order to understand the importance of performance context for the interpretation of Greek drama, let us consider the example of the City Dionysia and the

Classic Greek and Roman Drama various events related to the festival. The City Dionysia was at once a religious, civic, and poetic festival. Two days before the contests began the proagon (precontest) took place, at which the dramatic poets and performers appeared to announce the names of and offer hints about their productions. The next day, a procession escorted the statue of Dionysus Eleuthereus into Athens, including animal sacrifice, public feasting, and possibly late-night revelry (the komos). Five days of poetic competition ensued. The competitions also began with a series of both religious and civic rituals: a purificatory pig sacrifice, libations poured by the Athenian generals, a display of tribute (money received) from the allies of Athens, the reading aloud of the names of those citizens who received crowns of honor from the city, and a presentation of orphans called epheboi whose fathers had fallen in war and who were raised at the expense of the polis. On the first official day of the City Dionysia, audiences watched dithyrambic contests in which ten choruses—one chorus for each of the ten tribes in Athens —competed for first prize before the eyes of the entire polis; the competition featured both a men’s and a boys’ division. On the second day, five comic poets competed, each producing one comedy. Tragic competitions followed on the last three days of the festival; each day one tragic poet produced three tragedies, followed by one satyr-drama. Sometimes the trilogy and satyr-drama formed a related, coherent narrative (as in the case of our only surviving trilogy, the Oresteia of Aeschylus and its now-lost satyr-drama Proteus), but this seems to have been left to the prerogative of the tragic poet. After all three tragic trilogies had been performed, the ten Athenian generals voted for the best dithyrambic chorus, comedy, and tragic trilogy. They placed their votes into a jar, from which five votes were selected by lot to declare a winner. The victorious poet and producer or choregos (a wealthy citizen selected by the polis to fund the production) were awarded with crowns of laurel or ivy symbolizing their victory, just as victorious athletes in the ancient Olympic games were awarded with crowns (as were the victors in the 2004 Olympic games held in Athens). In addition, votes were cast for the best protagonistes, the ‘‘first actor’’ who had performed the leading roles in one set of trilogies. The prestige of such a victory cannot be underestimated, given that these competitions were attended by as many as 14,000 to 17,000 people—the number of people who could fit into the theater of Dionysus. The theater of Dionysus was an open-air theater located next to the temple of Dionysus on the southeastern slope of the Acropolis, the fortified citadel of Athens; this location offered the audience a view of the city, located below in the plains, while behind the audience the Acropolis and its temples loomed, including the spectacularly imposing Parthenon (constructed 447–432 B.C.). The theater centered on a large circular space known as the orchestra, in which the chorus performed. The skene, a temporary wooden stage building on the open side of the orchestra, served as a space for the actors to perform and as a backdrop for

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Western Drama through the Ages the dramas; the skene only became a permanent physical feature of the theater in the 330s B.C., when the first stone theater in Athens was built. A door in the center of the skene allowed characters in the dramas to enter and exit into an imagined interior space (for example, a palace, temple, or cave), while passageways to either side of the skene known as parodoi (singular parodos, ‘‘side-entrance’’) both enabled the entrance and exit for the chorus (hence their entrance song is referred to as the parodos) and allowed characters to enter from elsewhere within the dramatized polis or from lands foreign to the dramatic setting. (For those curious about the space and acoustics of a Greek theater, performances of many ancient Greek dramas are still produced in the well-preserved theater at Epidaurus.) These conventions do not require dramas to respect the so-called ‘‘unity of space’’—the Eumenides of Aeschylus features three different settings (the temple of Apollo at Delphi, the temple of Athena in Athens, and the Areopagus or ‘‘Hill of Ares’’ in Athens), and Aristophanic comedies change settings at a dizzying pace—but many tragedies of the fifth century B.C. only featured one dramatic setting and comedies of the later fourth century B.C. seem to have made this practice permanent. The large audience viewed these dramas from the theatron (viewing place). In the fifth century B.C., audiences sat either on the ground or on wooden benches; it was not until somewhere between 338 and 330 B.C. that the seats, and the entire theater of Dionysus, were rebuilt in stone. The audience included Athenian male citizens, resident aliens called metics, and foreign visitors. There is no certain evidence whether Athenian women and slaves were permitted to attend the dramatic performances at the City Dionysia. This uncertainty provides a serious interpretive stumbling block to our understanding of Greek drama. For example, in the Medea of Euripides (431 B . C .), Medea criticizes men for thinking that women, who were accustomed to live and work within the household, lead a life without danger; she asserts that ‘‘three times I’d rather stand in battle than give birth once!’’ How would such a comment attacking the military ethos central to ancient Greek life, to definitions of manhood and citizenship, have been received by the audience? Were there women amidst the audience able to assent to such an incendiary opinion? Or were women absent from the theater, enabling a space for dissenting males to ignore such remarks? Certainly the events of the tragic stage reached the ears (if not the eyes) of women, as is parodied in Aristophanes’s Thesmophoriazusae (Women of the Thesmophoria Festival, 411 B.C.), in which comedy the women of Athens hold an assembly in order to plot revenge against Euripides for his representation of women in his tragedies. In a similar vein, the modern reader must consider the numerous representations—sometimes flattering, sometimes parodic—of slaves in Greek drama. The production of a given Greek drama required a substantial number of individuals. Besides the poet who composed the drama and the choregos who

Classic Greek and Roman Drama produced and paid for it, a drama consisted of chorus (twelve or fifteen members for a tragic chorus, twenty-four for a comic chorus), a limited number of actors (as many as three actors in a tragedy, four to five in a comedy), and a musician to play the reed-pipes or aulos (an instrument akin to the oboe). It is unknown who created the costumes and masks used in these productions, or how technical aspects of the performance may have been managed, such as the deployment of either the ekkyklema, a small stage set on rollers that could be pushed out to reveal a scene from the interior of the skene, or the mechane, a crane on top of the skene that could be used for the appearances of gods, for Medea’s extraordinary escape in a chariot drawn by dragons at the end of Medea, or for Trygaeus’s ascent into heaven upon the dung beetle in Peace. If the same actors were used throughout a given tragic trilogy and its satyr-drama, the City Dionysia would require the participation of no fewer than 1,200 Athenian citizens. And it was in fact a requirement that the performers be Athenian, male citizens. The modern reader of drama will notice that no extant tragedy features as few as three characters nor does any comedy feature as few as four characters. Yet Aristotle states in his Poetics that tragedy initially only featured one hypokrites set against the chorus, and Aeschylus added a second actor and Sophocles added a third actor (other evidence suggests that this last addition occurred during the 460s B.C.). How, then, were these dramas performed? This system demands that actors had to play multiple roles within a single performance. When we combine this requirement with the knowledge that the protagonistes of each trilogy also competed for a crown (which suggests that the judges and audience would have watched at least their performances quite carefully), some fascinating implications for performance emerge. For instance, in the Philoctetes of Sophocles (409 B.C.), the plot revolves around the attempt of Neoptolemus, son of the hero Achilles, to persuade the hero Philoctetes to hand over the bow of Heracles, which is prophesied to be essential to victory in the Trojan War; unfortunately, when the Greeks had originally sailed to Troy, a snake bit Philoctetes’ foot and the wound festered, leading the Greeks to abandon Philoctetes alone on the island of Lemnos. The drama begins when Neoptolemus arrives on Lemnos in the company of the tricksterhero Odysseus; Odysseus explains that Neoptolemus must trick Philoctetes into giving him the bow, then return to Troy. Instead, Neoptolemus takes pity on the wounded but noble Philoctetes, and near the end of the drama, the two decide to reject the Greek cause at Troy and to hold their own. Suddenly the god Heracles, original possessor of Philoctetes’ bow, appears out of nowhere above the pair (a convention known by the Latin phrase deus ex machina or ‘‘god from the machine,’’ referring to the mechane or ‘‘crane’’ used for many gods’ aerial appearances) and commands the pair to fight in Troy. Many critics have taken Heracles’ injunction as a Sophoclean assertion of the exigencies of fate or of the nobility of the Trojan War; however, dramatic convention requires that the actor who plays

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Western Drama through the Ages the trickster Odysseus must also play the deified Heracles, and one cannot help but wonder if contemporary audiences, realizing that the same actor plays both characters, suspected Heracles to be the character Odysseus in disguise, tricking the pair to go to Troy. Since we know almost nothing about the actual staging, masks, or costumes of Philoctetes, this must remain pure conjecture, but such possibilities in performance can change a tragedy embracing heroic nobility into a disconcerting farce, altering drastically our understanding of a given Greek drama.

Greek Tragedy and Satyr-Drama Our knowledge of Greek tragedy derives primarily from the tragedies of three tragic poets: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. These three dramatists collectively composed a total of almost 300 dramas, but only thirty-two tragedies and one satyr-drama survive, all dating to the period 472–401 B.C., a mere seventyone years out of more than two centuries of ancient Greek drama. While we also know the names of various other tragic poets, such as Thespis and Agathon (the latter of whom appears as a character in both Aristophanes’s Women of the Thesmophoria and Plato’s Symposium), the tragedies of these other poets are almost entirely lost to us. Thus when we discuss the spirit of Greek tragedy, we can only discuss this spirit in terms of the dramas of these lone three individuals who have subsequently become icons of Greek tragedy, in part because they are all that has survived during the last two millennia. There is one more issue to consider in seeking the spirit of Greek tragedy. We have explored the Greek definition of drama, but tragedy, called tragoidia in ancient Greek, also merits consideration. Tragoidia derives from the words tragos (goat) and ode (song, from which derives English ode); thus tragoidia means ‘‘goat-song.’’ What exactly this goat-song stands for remains unclear. Is this a ‘‘song of the goat,’’ a drama performed either by actors dressed as goats, or, according to one radical theory, drama performed by adolescent males (the epheboi) colloquially called goats for their stinking breath and randy behavior? Or does goat-song mean ‘‘song for the goat,’’ meaning that dramatists competed to win the prize of a goat? Or perhaps goat-song means ‘‘song at the goat,’’ telling us that tragedies were performed at a goat sacrifice? Several possible interpretations exist for this puzzling goat-song. On the one hand, Dionysus was associated with satyrs, mythical creatures who were half-men and either half-horse or halfgoat. Satyrs were known for their drunken and libidinous behavior (what we might identify as ‘‘Dionysian behavior’’), so perhaps the term tragoidia preserves this connection between Dionysus and his followers, the satyrs. The fact that tragedies were always performed with a concluding satyr-drama featuring a chorus of satyrs might reinforce this connection. On the other hand, the festival of Dionysus seems to have included a goat sacrifice, so this might validate the meanings ‘‘song

Classic Greek and Roman Drama for the goat’’ (as a prize to sacrifice) or ‘‘song at the (sacrifice of the) goat.’’ Regardless of the precise interpretation of goat-song, the word tragoidia alludes to the role of ritual and sacrifice surrounding the performance of Greek drama, which in turn emphasizes the importance of ritual in Greek drama; the characters in most Greek dramas concern themselves with the proper performance of rituals, such as sacrificing to the gods, pouring libations to the dead, completing marriage rites, or purifying the community of the pollution incurred from an act of murder. Perhaps most importantly to any readers of Greek tragedy, tragoidia does not indicate whether a given drama is tragic or a serious narrative. This is not to say that Greek tragedies did not confront serious issues; rather, Greek tragedies confronted some of the most difficult issues of their times, probing questions of race, religion, morality, social justice, and politics. The seven surviving tragedies of Sophocles (c. 496–406 B.C.) have captivated audiences for centuries for their bold explorations of human destiny and the nature of free will. Oedipus Tyrannus (c. 429–425 B.C.) famously tells the story of Oedipus, the man who solved the riddle of the Sphinx and became king of Thebes, as he seeks to rid his city of a plague resulting from the pollution of the unpunished (and unsolved) murder of the previous king, Laius. What starts out as an inquiry into murder leads to the revelation that Oedipus, in an attempt to avert a prophecy predicting he would kill his father and marry his mother, has unwittingly committed both the murder of his father Laius and incest with his mother Jocasta. In the revelation and grief of such horrors, Oedipus retains his nobility through an act of self-mutilation, gouging out his own eyes, and by expelling himself from Thebes in order to rid the city of the plague. Oedipus’s most strange and cruel fate prompts several questions: is this the punishment a king deserves for seeking to protect his city? Or is this the punishment for seeking knowledge? Are all humans incapable of escaping fate, including great kings and clever men like Oedipus? Is this what it means to be human? There are no easy answers to these questions, but, then again, that is precisely the source of the tragedy in Oedipus Tyrannus; Oedipus has become king through his ability to solve riddles, but destroys his rule by failing to solve the riddle of his own life. A similarly bloody fate awaits another tyrannus who seeks to protect Thebes, Creon (Oedipus’s brother-in-law), in Sophocles’ Antigone (c. 442/1 B.C.). Creon’s ruin ensues when he is determined to punish anyone who will bury the corpse of the expelled king Polyneices, Creon’s own nephew. Consequently, Creon’s niece Antigone attempts to bury the body but is caught. In what follows, Creon and Antigone lay bare the conflicts at the very heart of ancient Greek custom and law, primarily the conflict between religious piety exemplified in custom and civic duty manifest in obedience to the law. It is intriguing that, in the ancient Greek language, the term nomos encapsulates both the concept of ‘‘custom’’ and ‘‘law,’’ thus part of the conflict in Antigone revolves around determining the

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Western Drama through the Ages meaning of nomos that is best for the polis. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Antigone, however, lies in its female protagonist, who defies Athenian stereotypes about the role of women in society and voices powerful opposition to Creon’s regime. In subsequent centuries Antigone has become an icon of familial loyalty and female determination in the face of tyrannical (male) adversity. We started our discussion of ancient Greek drama with an injunction to see how Greek drama is strange and foreign to our own views. Indeed, this injunction comes from Greek drama itself, which often uses this technique to question its beliefs and values. The earliest surviving Greek drama and the only surviving Greek drama about an actual historical topic, Aeschylus’s Persians (472 B.C.), was performed only seven years after the Persians had attempted to invade Greece and had ransacked Athens. Persians looks at the role of death and grief through the eyes of the enemies themselves, offering an almost sympathetic view of the Persians’ failed invasion and the ensuing loss of life. Fifty-seven years later, the Athenians would have their own empire and bring violence against other Greek cities, including the execution of the neutral inhabitants of the island of Melos in 418 B.C. and an invasion of Sicily in the summer of 415 B.C. In the midst of such acts, Euripides would produce Trojan Women (415 B.C.), a drama showing the harsh treatment of the women and children who survived the sack of Troy. The former queen Hecuba watches as her family is torn apart, her daughter Cassandra is driven mad, her daughter-in-law Andromache is dragged away as a slave, and her grandson Astyanax (son of Andromache and the famous Trojan warrior Hector) is murdered, thrown from the ruined citadel of Troy. It is hard not to see Trojan Women as a criticism about the brutality of war, if not an outright antiwar tragedy (indeed, the play was revived in New York during protests over the American invasion of Iraq in 2003). Neither Persians nor Trojan Women rejoice in the victories of the Greeks; rather both use the suffering and devastation of an enemy to show the consequences of violence and warfare. Only one trilogy survives complete from antiquity, the Oresteia of Aeschylus (first produced in 458 B.C.). The Oresteia provides a unique opportunity to see how the complexities of morality, justice, and law could evolve over the course of a single trilogy. In the opening play, Agamemnon the king of Argos (from whom the play takes its title) returns home after a ten-year absence while fighting in the Trojan War. We learn that Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter Iphigeneia before the war and he has annihilated Troy. Agamemnon’s entrance halfway through the tragedy features an awkward welcome by his wife Clytemnestra, who convinces Agamemnon to enter the palace treading upon a crimson carpet. This carpet vividly symbolizes the rivers of blood that will spill throughout this trilogy, most immediately in the murder of Agamemnon (offstage) by Clytemnestra and her secret lover, Aegisthus, an exiled cousin who holds a grudge against Agamemnon (Agamemnon’s father Atreus once tricked Aegisthus’s father

Classic Greek and Roman Drama Thyestes into eating his own children, Aegisthus’s brothers). The cycle of violence continues into the second play of the trilogy, Libation Bearers, when Agamemnon’s son Orestes returns to Argos seven years later and seeks to avenge his father’s murder. This play too ends in murder—this time, the double murders of Aegisthus and Clytemnestra by Orestes—but this act does not end the cycle of vengeance, for Orestes is in turn pursued by the Erinyes or ‘‘Furies,’’ archaic spirits who exact revenge on the behalf of wronged mothers. Thus Agamemnon and Libation Bearers ask the audience to consider which side has acted with justice: the rightful but brutal king who has killed his own daughter? The mother who has lost her daughter but has taken a lover and thus violated her role as wife and queen? The son who seeks to avenge his father by killing his mother and uncle, even though his father has murdered his sister? Is there any form of justice or law that will end this cycle of bloodshed? Aeschylus finishes the trilogy with an astounding conclusion in the Eumenides. To resolve the conflict between Orestes and the Furies, the goddess Athena invents Greece’s first homicide court and selects a jury of Athenians to judge the case on the Areopagus. During the trial, the god Apollo makes a controversial argument that Orestes had to avenge Agamemnon since the father is the only true biological parent, whereas the mother merely carries the offspring, pointing to Athena herself as proof of this (Zeus gave birth to Athena from his own head). The Furies remain unconvinced, as well as half the jury; the trial ends in a tied vote, and Athena, declaring that she will always side with fathers over mothers, pronounces Orestes acquitted of matricide. The Furies threaten to destroy Athens, so Athena offers them a role as protectors of the polis and bribes them with cult worship, transforming the Furies into the Eumenides (hence the play’s title). With such a conclusion Aeschylus ends the cycle of blood vengeance with the Athenian homicide court, the violence of archaic vengeance goddesses with the rational justice of the young goddess Athena, and the brutal monarchy of Agamemnon and murderous tyranny of Aegisthus with a declaration of the virtues of democracy in Athens. However other questions arise: does Athena’s law court actually replace the old system of vengeance and resolve feuds? What does it mean that Athena’s verdict requires the aid of religious cult and good, old-fashioned bribery? Is the Oresteia a praise of the virtues of Athenian democracy, or a lament for the days when the elite court of the Areopagos had greater control of Athenian law, control the court had lost just three years before in 461 B.C .? Does Athenian democracy implicitly advocate citizens to deny the importance of mothers? The Oresteia thus leaves its audience unsettled and with an array of difficult questions to consider. If we must define ‘‘the spirit of Greek tragedy,’’ perhaps it is this unsettled spirit, this epic and often tragic struggle to understand the complexities and limitations of human action and divine injunction.

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Greek Comedy: Aristophanes and ‘‘Old Comedy’’ Where Greek tragedy basks in the failures and limits of humanity, Greek comedy revels in the potential greatness of humankind, or, at least, the potential for happiness. In fact, komoidia, the Greek word for the genre of comedy, literally means ‘‘song of the revelers’’ and refers to the komos, a ritual in which bands of men wandered around the city singing and drinking in celebration. While our evidence for Greek comedy in the fifth century B . C ., what came to be called Old Comedy, is limited to the eleven surviving comedies of Aristophanes (career 427–c. 385 B.C.) and a small collection of various comic fragments, it is clear that comedy functioned as a witty and incisive voice for the polis, decrying the ineptitude of arrogant politicians while exalting the potential greatness of the Athenian citizen. The comedies of Aristophanes vary wildly in dramatic setting and in theme. Many plays primarily satirize a single target: inept and corrupt politicians (Knights, produced in 424 B.C.), the ‘‘new education’’ of the late fifth century B.C. (Clouds in 423 B.C.), the law courts (Wasps in 422 B.C.), or even the tragic poet Euripides (Women of the Thesmophoria in 411 B.C., Frogs in 404 B.C.). Of course, no one is safe in the world of Aristophanic comedy, as our poet takes shot at young elite males, foreigners, women, and even the elderly. Aristophanes’s biggest target, however, is war itself. He repeatedly offers antiwar comedies, such as Acharnians (425 B.C.), Peace (421 B.C.), and, most notably, Lysistrata (411 B.C.). This reflects the ongoing exhaustion that some Athenians no doubt felt during the protracted Peloponnesian War (431–404 B.C.) that Athens waged against the Spartans and their allies, as well as against an increasing number of Athens’s own defecting allies. Indeed, Lysistrata captures this frustration in vivid fashion. In the comedy, the women of Greece have grown tired of the Peloponnesian War and the ongoing absence of their husbands, who are always on campaign. The Athenian Lysistrata thus convinces both Athenian and Spartan women to stage a sex strike until their husbands put an end to the war. While Lysistrata delights in scenes of both great innuendo and incredibly frank sexualized banter, the play also offers a fantasy about the possibility that the world might just be a better place if the women were in control. In the end, however, the men make peace, everyone makes love, and the natural order of things is restored. On stage, Lysistrata ends well for the Athenians; in the real world, the war lasted another seven years.

Drama in the Fourth Century B.C.: Tragic Revivals, Menander, and ‘‘New Comedy’’ Athens lost the Peloponnesian War to Sparta in 404 B.C. and became an oligarchy ruled by a bloodthirsty group of men we now refer to as the Thirty Tyrants.

Classic Greek and Roman Drama Although the Thirty Tyrants were deposed and democracy was restored one year later in 403 B.C., Athens never quite recovered. It may only be mere coincidence, but Greek drama too started to take on a decidedly different character at this same time. The two surviving comedies of Aristophanes from the early fourth century B .C., Women of the Ecclesia (c. 393–391 B. C.) and Wealth (388 B. C.), show hints of change; while the plots of both plays bear some similarities to Aristophanes’ earlier comedies (especially Women of the Ecclesia, in which the Athenian women stage a take over of the Athenian government reminiscent of Lysistrata), the more fantastic elements found in plays like Clouds or Frogs are greatly muted. The chorus that had played such a central structural role in fifth century drama has almost completely disappeared in these plays, suggesting that the collective voice of the polis was gradually stepping off the dramatic stage. In a similar vein, the production of Greek tragedies seems to have significantly diminished, and, with the possible exception of the Rhesus, dubiously attributed to Euripides, we have no surviving tragedy from the fourth century. Greek drama, of course, did not come to a complete halt in the fourth century B . C . Interest in fifth century tragedy led to revivals of the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides throughout the fourth century, and in the 330s B.C. the Athenian statesman Lycurgus successfully passed a motion to collect copies of the scripts of these three tragedians and to place them in the Athenian archives. This legislation thus marked the first step in a long historical process that has led to the survival of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides into the present day. Lycurgus not only made possible the survival of fifth century tragedy, but also the survival of the theatrical space itself, for he also built the first permanent stone theater in Athens, which can still be seen today on the northeastern slope of the Acropolis. While tragedy primarily survived in the form of revival in the fourth century B.C., Greek comedy continued to thrive. A variety of later sources inform us that something called ‘‘Middle Comedy’’ gained much popularity in Athens, although no comedy from this period survives today. Nor does much ‘‘New Comedy’’ survive, the direct successor of Middle Comedy and a dramatic form of immense popularity throughout the remainder of antiquity. We know of various comic poets, such as Alexis, Diphilus, and Philemon, but the great popularity of New Comedy was principally due to the success of the comedies of Menander (342/1–292/1 B.C.), whose influence rivals, if not outstrips, the impact of the Greek tragedians. Nevertheless, despite Menander’s popularity and influence, only one of his comedies, the Dyscolos (variously translated Old Cantankerous or The Miser and first produced in 316 B.C.), survives wholly intact, recovered as recently as 1957 from an Egyptian papyrus. The Dyscolos of Menander reveals that tastes in comedy had undergone significant changes by the end of the fourth century B.C. The outrageous fantasy and

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Western Drama through the Ages direct political humor of Aristophanic comedy disappear completely in Menander and New Comedy; instead, there are stock characters and situations that could take place in almost any Greek town at any time. Young gentlemen pine for slave girls who turn out to be the long lost daughters of noblemen, face conflict in the form of their own father or the young girl’s father, and are surrounded by a host of stereotypical characters—caring friends, clever slaves, social parasites, and the like. While the Dyscolos and a small handful of other fragments provide the extent of our evidence for New Comedy, we can observe the powerful influence of Menander at work in the twenty-seven surviving comedies of the Roman dramatists Plautus (c. 254–184 B.C.) and Terence (d. 159 B.C.), who explicitly cite Menander as a source in many of their prologues, in the Greek romance novels of the first through fifth centuries A.D., and later still in the comedies of Shakespeare and the modern ‘‘sitcom’’ or situational comedy.

The Afterlife Of Ancient Greek Drama In the Frogs of Aristophanes (404 B.C.), the god Dionysus visits Hades in order to retrieve Euripides from the realm of the dead. The god soon finds himself judging a poetry contest between Euripides and Aeschylus, and choosing in the end to take not Euripides but Aeschylus back to the realm of the living. Aristophanes thus presents his audience with a twofold vision of Greek drama as something that belongs to the dead, but simultaneously remains important to the present well-being of the living Athenian polis. Regardless of whether he ever intended Frogs for later generations of audiences, Aristophanes predicted in Frogs the enduring influence and spirit of Greek drama. The tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as the comedies of Aristophanes and Menander had a significant impact on the Romans, who in turn modeled their own dramas on (and sometimes adapted directly from) Greek tragedy and comedy. The comedies of Plautus and Terence explicitly acknowledge their debt to Menander and the poets of New Comedy on many occasions, while the tragedies of Seneca often exhibit some influence from Sophocles and Euripides. (Even the epic poet Virgil shows some signs of influence from Euripidean tragedy in his masterpiece, the Aeneid.) In turn, Plautus, Terence, and Seneca all had a direct impact on the evolution of Western drama, carrying the spirit of Greek drama along with them. Although Greek literature disappeared in Western Europe between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance, Byzantine scholars preserved Greek drama in the East until the fall of Constantinople led many scholars and booksellers to travel into Western Europe; it is along with them that Greek drama returned to the Western tradition. Greek drama is now visible in many places throughout the world, whether in modern revivals in the pristine theater at Epidaurus or in local productions of Lysistrata and Trojan Women, two plays often revived by political protesters in times of war. There are frequent productions and

Classic Greek and Roman Drama adaptations of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, and Euripides’s Medea and Bacchae in national theaters, in community playhouses, and on college campuses. At the time of the composition of this volume, a hip-hop adaptation of Aeschylus’s Seven Against Thebes has just premiered at the New York Theater Workshop, and Aristophanes’s Frogs has recently seen renewed (after-)life as a musical comedy on Broadway. Even in death, the spirit of Greek drama lives on.

WHAT IS ROMAN DRAMA? In the broadest terms, Roman drama refers to any dramatic form—tragedy, comedy, farce, mime, and pantomime—composed in the Latin language, a language used by the inhabitants of the city of Rome and that eventually became the administrative language of the Roman Republic (509–30 B.C.) and the Roman Empire (30 B.C.–476 A.D.). The diverse nature of Roman drama can be understood by looking at the two different origins of Roman drama. According to one tradition, the Romans witnessed the first dramatic performance in Rome in 364 B.C., when the Etruscans (a race inhabiting the region now known as Tuscany) staged the performance in order to help the Romans avert a plague. The Etruscans seem to have performed some form of dance accompanied by flute music; in turn, young Roman males imitated this dance form, suiting the flute music and their movements to an earlier poetic form known as Fescennine verses, in which males playfully insulted their peers in order to demonstrate their cleverness and wit. Thus it is perhaps better to say that the Etruscans introduced the Romans to the idea of spectacle (song and dance), which the Romans themselves modified into something more akin to drama. While it is unclear to what extent this Etruscan influence continued to be felt in Roman drama, the Etruscans gave the Romans the Latin word for actor, histrio (ancestor of English histrionic, a term used to describe someone who is acting in an excessively dramatic manner). Despite the Etruscan performance, many Romans considered the first official dramatic performance in Rome in 240 B.C. as the birth of Roman drama. At this time, a certain Livius Andronicus was commissioned to stage a tragedy and a comedy at the ludi Romani (Roman games), a festival in honor of the god Jupiter Optimus Maximus (Jupiter Best and Greatest) in thanks for the Roman victory over the Carthaginians in the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.). Livius Andronicus was a Greek slave who had been brought to Rome from the town of Tarentum in Southern Italy (a region known in antiquity as Magna Graecia or ‘‘Great Greece’’ because it had been colonized by Greeks in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C.). Andronicus’s Greek origins are important since he seems to have staged his performances in the style of Greek tragedy and comedy, although it is unclear whether his performances were translations or adaptations of Greek dramas. (It is worth noting that Livius Andronicus is also famous for his translation of

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Western Drama through the Ages Homer’s Odyssey, the first epic to appear in the Latin language). Many Romans thus considered the performance of Greek drama in the Latin language—or the translation of Greek drama into ‘‘barbarian,’’ as the comic poet Plautus jests—as the birth of Roman drama. Two centuries later the Roman lyric poet Horace would elegantly express this idea that Greek culture dominated over Roman imperial power, writing in his Epistles that, ‘‘Captive Greece captured her savage captor and brought the arts to rustic Latium [i.e., the Romans].’’ Greek drama continued to have an impact on the emerging Roman stage, as is evident in the categories the Romans eventually used to describe their dramas. Originally known as comoediae (a Latin transliteration of the Greek word for ‘‘comedies’’), the fabulae palliatae were plays set in Greece, hence they were Roman comedies in Greek dress (literally, ‘‘stories wearing a Greek cloak or pallium’’). These comedies derived from and adapted Greek sources, such as the domestic comedies of the famous Greek dramatist Menander. The fabulae palliatae include twenty-one surviving comedies by Plautus and six surviving comedies by Terence, all of which date roughly to the period 206–160 B.C. and which are the sources for much of our knowledge about Roman comedy. In contrast, we do not have any complete fabulae togatae, or ‘‘stories in Roman dress’’ (referring to the white toga Roman adult males wore), comedies set in Rome or Italy. We do know that togatae were composed mainly in the second century B.C. by such authors as Titinius and Afranius, but they are sadly lost to modern audiences. Most surviving Roman tragedies are also Greek in style, belonging to the category known as the fabula cothurnata, a Roman tragedy in Greek dress, referring to the high boots (cothurni) tragic actors wore as part of their stage costume. These tragedies were set in Greece, featured Greek characters, and borrowed both from Greek mythology and from Greek tragedians such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Roman historical dramas set in Rome or Italy were called fabulae praetextae, Roman tragedies in Roman dress, referring to the toga praetexta worn by the Roman magistrates who would have provided the characters at the center of such dramas. We have several fragments both of cothurnatae and praetextae dating to the third through first centuries B.C., by such authors as Livius Andronicus, Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius. However, the only dramas surviving in complete form, nine cothurnatae and one praetexta, are those attributed to the Stoic philosopher Seneca and belong to the period c. 41–65 A.D. Roman drama consisted of much more than comedy and tragedy. There also existed the fabulae Atellanae or Atellan farce, a form of mostly improvised farce derived from the Oscan region of Campania in central Italy. Atellan farce featured actors who used fixed masks to play stock characters in low-life situations and vulgar language. Another largely (but not exclusively) improvised dramatic form was mime, which also originated in the Greek-speaking world, particularly in Magna Graecia and on the Greek-colonized island of Sicily. Although there was

Classic Greek and Roman Drama a long literary tradition of mime in the Greek-speaking world, our Roman sources treat mime as the lowest form of drama, in part because mimic actors imitated low-life situations in low language, in part because the actors themselves were slaves, freedmen, or (most scandalously) freedwomen, who did not wear masks and who exposed themselves fully to eyes of the public. Similarly considered scandalous was pantomime, in which one actor sang a libretto (fabula saltica) while another masked actor acted out the events with gestures and movement. Pantomime was the most popular dramatic form in the first century A.D., only to be rivaled by the popularity of circus games and gladiatorial combat (famous to modern audiences from the Ridley Scott film Gladiator). However, despite the immense popularity of Atellan farce, mime, and pantomime, these dramatic forms are mostly lost to us, existing now only in descriptions of particular performances that exhibited spectacular visual effects (like actors vomiting fake blood, onstage crucifixions, and re-enactments of scenes from classical mythology, such as the coupling of Pasiphae¨ and the bull of Poseidon); we also have titles of individual farces and mimes, a miscellany of literary fragments (that is, quotations in other Roman sources), and visual representations found in the rich archaeological evidence of statuettes, mosaics, and paintings.

The Performance of Roman Drama Roman comedies and tragedies were performed primarily at festivals known as ludi (literally, ‘‘games’’), temple dedications, triumphal parades celebrating military victories, and even funerals commemorating the death of Roman aristocrats. It is important to recognize that the ancient Romans did not make the modern distinction between religious and civic activity, so that these various religious rituals were also considered civic activities on the behalf of the Roman state. For instance, the ludi Romani in 240 B.C.—during which Livius Andronicus staged the first official Roman dramas—were both a form of religious thanks to the god Jupiter Optimus Maximus and a civic celebration of the Roman military victory over the Carthaginians. While the dramatic performances at temple dedications, triumphs, and funerals were one-time events motivated by the success or death of an individual, the ludi were state-sponsored events that occurred annually. The late third century B.C. witnessed an increasing number of public ludi celebrated in Rome, such that by the late first century B.C., no fewer than forty-three days out of each calendar year were dedicated to ludi. Mime and pantomime were also performed at ludi, although it is possible that some socalled ‘‘popular’’ mime may have also taken place in public streets, piazzas, and private houses and on no particular occasion. The Roman nobility played an active role in the organization of dramatic performances. In the case of the ludi, civic magistrates, who were ascending the

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Western Drama through the Ages cursus honorum (course of magistracies) to political prominence in Rome, were often responsible for funding the ludi, for organizing the entertainment, for erecting the temporary wooden stage and audience seating, and so forth; in the case of temple dedications, triumphs, and funerals, the sponsor or the family of the deceased undertook such duties and expenses. In either case, the organizers always belonged to the Roman nobility, with the consequence that most dramatic events would have appeared to the audience as the result of the munificence of the Roman state and the aristocracy—or, at least, of particular aristocrats. Even if the audience did not specifically identify a given performance with the organizer, the organizers likely influenced the choice of the fabula or plot of a given dramatic performance, so that a tragedy might be performed to celebrate (directly or indirectly) a particular family’s ancestors or the individual himself. This seems to be the case of the Adelphoe (Brothers) of Terence, which was produced at the funeral games of Lucius Aemilius Paullus in 160 B.C.; some see the theme of clemency as central to the comedy and suggest that the presence of this theme in the comedy is meant to augment Paullus’ own reputation as a merciful victor in war. Finally, the very presence of several dramatists in Rome, including Livius Andronicus, Ennius, and Terence, was due to the direct patronage of individual Roman aristocrats. Thus staging a drama in Rome was always, in some sense, a political event, organized for the city, by the city’s prominent citizens, and with consequences for the organizers in the eyes of the city. The Roman stage itself quite literally displays the political nature of Roman drama. Roman theaters were initially temporary wooden structures, built for each festival and taken down afterwards. Both the surviving Roman comedies and South Italian vase-paintings suggest that the stage often looked like a portion of a common city block, wide enough to accommodate the entrances into two or three characters’ houses and as tall as two stories in height. Rome had no permanent stone theater until 55 B.C., when the famed Roman general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (Pompey the Great) built a magnificent theater with a shrine in honor of the goddess Venus Victrix (Venus the Conqueror) with the likely intent of increasing his political clout and popularity among the Roman populace. While Pompey himself was defeated by Julius Caesar in the Roman civil war and murdered in 48 B. C ., Pompey’s stone theater set the standard for architecture in the early Roman Empire; later emperors similarly used the construction of theaters and coliseums to host the ‘‘bread and circuses’’—that is, the food handouts and spectacles of drama, mime, and gladiatorial combat—that appealed to and pacified the Roman masses. Thus the construction of and activities in Roman theaters came to be seen as indicators of an individual’s political success. While the Roman nobility funded Roman dramas, the actors themselves were anything but noble. As opposed to Greek drama in the fifth century B.C., in which actors were adult male citizens of mostly distinguished pedigree, Roman dramas

Classic Greek and Roman Drama were devoid of aristocrats, for the Roman nobility considered it ignoble to perform in drama. As a result, the actors in Roman dramas were either male slaves or former slaves who had acquired their freedom (known as freedmen). The slaves often belonged to a single owner known as the dominus gregis (literally, the ‘‘master of the flock’’), who served as the director and producer of the drama and who might collaborate with the author or perform as the lead actor. Interestingly, in the performance of mime, women were permitted to act in female roles; consequently, these women sometimes even attained the status of starlets, much like gladiators did in the arena of combat. Of course, like her male counterparts in all forms of Roman drama (as well as gladiators), the female mime-actress was not considered a citizen but considered a low member of society, an indecent counterpart to virtuous Roman matronae (wives). Despite their low social status, these actors and actresses must have been well trained in order to perform the highly stylized roles and complicated cantica (songs) found in surviving Roman drama. It is an intriguing paradox that the Roman nobility, on the one hand, funded and attended the performance of various forms of Roman drama, but, on the other hand, seem to have disdained the very actors who performed the dramas themselves.

Roman Comedy: Plautus and Terence Roman comedy is a strange concoction of Greek comedy and Roman sensibility. As Plautus and Terence frequently tell their audiences in the prologues of their plays, the fabulae palliatae (comedies in Greek dress) are in large part adaptations of plays from a Greek theatrical movement known as New Comedy, an immensely popular form of comic drama that originated in Athens in the fourth century B.C. at the hands of such renowned dramatists as Alexis, Diphilus, Philemon, and Menander. Yet it is a curious accident of history that Roman comedy in fact provides the majority of our evidence for New Comedy; while only one complete example of Greek New Comedy survives (Menander’s Dyscolos or Old Cantankerous, first performed in 316 B.C.), there exist today twenty-seven complete plays in Latin by Plautus and Terence. Oddly enough, then, the tastes of Roman audiences are primarily responsible for our knowledge of New Comedy. This accident of history may nevertheless provide one key to our understanding of surviving Roman comedy, for the fabulae palliatae are not merely adaptations of Greek comedy, but are also vacations from the city of Rome itself. This is literally true insofar as these comedies were performed at the ludi while the Romans were on vacation, during state-sanctioned religious holidays called feriae or dies feriales. But the fabulae or plots of these comedies also took a day off from life in Rome, so that a cavalcade of Greek characters paraded across the stage—in some cases, even other kinds of foreigners appeared, such as the title character in

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Western Drama through the Ages Plautus’s Poenulus (The Little Carthaginian). Admittedly, these comedies were not altogether foreign to Romans, as many Greek concepts were translated into Roman concepts for the sake of the audience’s understanding; thus, Greek characters sometimes bargain with Roman coinage and talk about Roman legislative bodies. Nevertheless, it is important to ask why the Romans found this Greek comedy so pleasurable. Many critics of Roman comedy suppose that this displacement of events from the Roman world to the Greek world made possible the world turned upside down on the Roman stage. Perhaps the Romans enjoyed Greek comedy because the events in the plays happened over there in Greece, but not here in Italy. It is a sad accident of historical preservation that the fabulae palliatae survive from antiquity, but the fabulae togatae (the toga-clad stories) did not; it would be a considerable advancement in our knowledge of the history of Western drama if we could see how Roman dramatists handled comedy directly touching on their own home turf. On the other hand, the fact that only the fabulae palliatae survive, combined with the distinguished reputations of Plautus and Terence in other ancient sources, might suggest that the Romans themselves found something preferable in keeping their festive play away from Rome and from home. Interestingly, Plautus and Terence themselves were not of Roman origin (nor, for that matter, were most dramatists during the Roman Republic). Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254–184 B.C.) seems to have been a slave from Sarsina in the Umbrian region of central Italy. At least, this is part of the persona that Plautus may have adopted for himself, as his name suggests: Plautus is a Romanized form of the Umbrian name Plotus, meaning either ‘‘big-eared’’ or ‘‘flat-footed,’’ while Maccius likely derives from the name Maccus, a famous stock-character from Atellan farce. (Thus one distinguished critic has recently suggested that Plautus’ name is a theatrical pseudonym that would translate into modern American English as something like ‘‘Dick Harpo Floppe´.’’) On the other hand, Publius Terentius Afer (Terence the African) seems to have come to Rome as a slave from the city of Carthage. Terence’s wit and good looks earned him both his freedom and close relations with various members of the Roman nobility, whose support contributed to his success. Unfortunately, Terence’s career was short-lived; ancient sources claim that, when the young dramatist went abroad to Greece in 159 B.C., he died at sea. Plautus and Terence may not have been native Romans and their fabulae palliatae may not have been set in the dramatic location of Rome, but these comedies nevertheless portray and exemplify many fundamental Roman values, even if these values seem somewhat hidden at first. Consider the example of Plautus’s Pseudolus (first performed in 191 B.C.). Upon first glance, the Pseudolus is a wildly extravagant, somewhat un-Roman comedy. The young Athenian gentleman Calidorus has fallen in love with a slave girl Phoenicium, who both lives next door

Classic Greek and Roman Drama under the control of the villainous pimp Ballio and is about to be sold that very day. In desperation, Calidorus asks his slave Pseudolus for help in procuring Phoenicium. In the process of securing Phoenicium for Calidorus, Pseudolus not only cheats Ballio of his slave girl, but Pseudolus also outwits Calidorus’s own father Simo, winning a tidy sum of money in a bet with Simo. By the end of the play, Calidorus has the girl and Pseudolus is both flush with cash and (literally) drunk with success, while father and pimp alike have been hoodwinked. (To make matters worse for Ballio, he has also lost a bet to Simo. . .on his birthday, no less!) And yet, despite this raucous display of slaves, pimps, and prostitutes, the events in the play reflect traditional Roman values: sons must respect their fathers (Calidorus is still a good son, properly fearful of his father); slaves must respect their masters (Pseudolus may swindle Simo, but he also helps Simo recoup his losses); everyone must respect their place in the order of society (Pseudolus is no less a slave at the end of the play). We might wonder whether every member of a diverse Roman audience would have respected these same moral values, or to what extent a comedy like Pseudolus undermines those values by setting them into the midst of crafty slaves and cruel pimps. Nevertheless, in combining wild, comic extravagance with the more traditional moral resolution at the end of his plays, Plautus ensures that all audiences can applaud and go home happy. The surviving comedies of Plautus and Terence reveal that both dramatists worked with a fairly set stock of characters inherited from New Comedy: the clever slave, the stern father, the lovesick son, the beloved slave girl who turns out to be of noble stock, the greedy pimp, the boastful soldier, the social parasite. Moreover, the dramatists used a relatively fixed number of situations also found in New Comedy: boy loves girl, son resists father, slave tricks father, general misunderstanding and recognition leading to resolution. Nevertheless, Plautus and Terence both applied their own unique touches. As we have already seen in the Pseudolus, Plautus delights in eccentric characters and outrageous situations; other Plautine comedies feature such distinctive and enduring characters as miserly old men who bury their savings (Aulularia or The Pot of Gold) and identical twins separated at birth (Menaechmi), or playful elements involving complicated financial swindles (Trinummus or Three Dollar Day) and even fake haunted houses (Mostellaria or The Ghost). Indeed, this delight in eccentricity and outrageousness often leaves the characters of the play looking like little more than two-dimensional parodies of humanity, as we see in the learned speech of the profligate youth Philolaches in Mostellaria: ‘‘I have pondered long and hard, and I have gone through many arguments in heart—if I have something called a heart at all—and I have mulled over and long disputed this matter, and it seems to me that man, of whatever sort he is once he has been born, that he is similar to and has the shape of. . .now where did I put that example?. . .that he is like a new house!’’ Such is the emotional range of Plautine youth.

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Western Drama through the Ages Terence, in stark contrast to Plautine comedy, does not rely upon outrageous comic elements and purely stock characters, but tends instead toward the subtle exploration and understanding of human character. As a result, the plots of Terence’s comedies themselves take on a somewhat different shape that allow for more in-depth character development. In Adelphoe (160 B.C.), a strict father Demea gives one of his two sons to his brother Micio so that Micio might raise the boy in a less strict manner and the two ‘‘fathers’’ might compare methods of raising sons— as it turns out, brother knows best. In Hecyra (The Mother-in-Law) (first performed unsuccessfully in 165 B.C., with two subsequent performances in 160 B.C.), Terence takes the age-old stereotype of the wicked mother-in-law and turns it upside down, showing how the mother-in-law Sostrata helps her daughter and son-in-law find harmony amidst domestic misunderstanding. Perhaps the most iconic representation of the depth and nobility of Terence’s characters can be found in the figure of Chremes, the title character of The Self-Tormenter (163 B.C .), who famously proclaims, ‘‘I am human; I consider nothing that is human alien to me.’’ With such sentiments, Terence moves away from the flat stereotypes of Plautine comedy and refines Roman comedy into a vehicle for a kind of humanitas or ‘‘humanism’’ that would go on to deeply influence the classical spirit.

Roman Tragedy and Seneca The surviving Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence all belong to the late third and early second centuries B.C., at a time when the Romans were gradually expanding the size and influence of their empire. At this same time the Romans also enjoyed performances of tragedy, both the fabulae cothurnatae modeled on classical Greek tragedy and (eventually) the fabulae praetextae that depicted famous events in the emerging national consciousness of the Roman people. While it is clear that Roman tragedy flourished in the hands of the poets Livius Andronicus and Naevius in the third century B.C., and in the works of Ennius, Pacuvius, and Accius in the second and first centuries B.C., these dramas do not survive today in anything more than fragmentary form, passed down to us in tattered lines and off-handed references in other works of literature. The Roman tragedies that do survive, the ten tragedies attributed to Seneca, belong not to the expanding Roman Republic of the period 240–85 B.C., but rather to the established Roman Empire of the late first century B.C. and the first century A.D. In some ways, these surviving tragedies of the Roman Empire exhibit features quite similar to what little we know of the tragedy of the Roman Republic. Both phases of Roman tragedy draw heavily and somewhat self-consciously upon the Greek tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and especially Euripides, the most popular of the Greek tragedians in later antiquity. In the ten Senecan plays, nine are Greek-style cothurnatae about famous characters and events from Greek

Classic Greek and Roman Drama mythology, such as Thyestes, Medea, Oedipus, Troades (Trojan Women), and Hercules Furens (Hercules Gone Mad). These tragedies display both basic structural similarities to the older Greek and Roman tragedies (prologues, episodes broken up by Choral interludes) as well as general thematic parallels (intrigue, recognition, and the fall of characters of great social status or power). The spirit of Senecan tragedy, however, emerges as something more frightening and more philosophically powerful than that of its predecessors. This may derive in some part from Seneca’s own biography. Like most Roman dramatists, Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–65 A.D.) was not born on Italian soil but in the city of Cordoba in the Roman province of Spain; quite unlike his tragic ancestors, however, Seneca was one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the Roman Empire, not only a prominent Stoic philosopher but also the tutor and trusted advisor of the infamous emperor Nero (who reigned from 54–68 A.D.). Seneca’s Stoicism has a profound effect on his tragedies, and his characters speak as if they are contemplating the depths and limits of the human soul itself. The hero Hercules in both Hercules Furens and Hercules Oetaeus (Hercules on Mt. Oeta) manifests the idea that, if the human soul should endure great suffering, then an individual may find moral purification. Most Senecan tragedies, however, end with a much bleaker view of humanity. In the Thyestes, the character Atreus deliberates at great length whether he will in fact murder the children of his brother and rival for the royal throne of Mycenae, Thyestes; once Atreus has committed himself to the act of murder, he decides to plunge further into the depths of absolute wickedness, feeding the children to Thyestes and reveling in the crime. Although the myth existed for centuries before Seneca (found notably in a lost play by Sophocles in the fifth century B.C. and more recently in a production by the Roman tragedian Lucius Varius Rufus in 29 B.C.), the horror with which Seneca presents the deliberations of Atreus far exceeds anything ever presented on the tragic stage. In fact, Atreus’s acts in the tragedy are so wicked that the ghost of his grandfather, the wicked Tantalus, is stirred from his sufferings in the Underworld, while the day has been blotted out, the stars obliterated from the very heavens. The impossibility of staging events of such cosmic proportions, as well as a general lack of verbal cues for stage directions in the texts, has led some scholars to believe that Seneca did not write his tragedies for production on the Roman stage, but for reading in public recitals. Indeed, tragedies in the early Roman Empire do not seem to have been performed onstage as they had been in classical Athens or during the Roman Republic, but were now the objects of a cultured, literary elite who attended recitals. This likely change in setting for the performance of imperial Roman tragedy, so different from the performance context of Greek and Republican Roman tragedy, may have affected another aspect of the content of Roman tragedy. These tragedies seem to have increasingly appeared to many as veiled forms of criticism of the emperor. It is said that a certain Mamercus Scaurus

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Western Drama through the Ages was forced to commit suicide for allusions to the emperor Tiberius (reign 14– 37 A.D.) in his tragedy Atreus. Intriguing in this light is our only surviving fabula praetexta (that is, the only tragedy with a dramatic setting in Rome), the pseudo-Senecan Octavia. The tragedy depicts the events surrounding the divorce of Nero from his noble wife Octavia, Nero’s subsequent marriage to the cruel Poppaea Sabina, and Octavia’s subsequent exile and execution. While it is doubtful that Seneca would have written this play during the reign of Nero—and Seneca died three years before Nero, hence the question of the play’s authenticity—the tragedy nevertheless belongs to the late first century A.D., just after Nero’s death, and thus shows the directness with which tragedy could criticize a recent imperial regime. Or, to put it in different terms, the Octavia shows that the Roman cultural elite recognized the preoccupation with the figure of the tyrant so characteristic of classical Greek tragedy, and therefore used tragedy as a vehicle for the exploration and criticism of the imperial tyranny in their own midst.

Roman Drama after the Fall of Rome With the death of the barren heroine at the end of Octavia, Roman drama comes to its own end, insofar as no other comedies or tragedies survive from the Roman Empire. However, just as Hercules endured suffering to bring the seeds of civilization to the frontiers of the Mediterranean world, Roman drama and Roman comedy in particular have endured much to bring forth the seeds of much of the Western dramatic tradition. The comedies of Plautus and Terence have had far-reaching consequences, deeply influencing the stock characters and plots of the Italian tradition of commedia dell’arte, which in turn entered into the English language in the form of Shakespeare’s comedies, such as the Comedy of Errors, an adaptation of Plautus’ Menaechmi. The historical dramas of Elizabethan theater were also deeply influenced by the tragedies of Seneca. The complex structures of opera derived in some measure from the recitatives and arias of Roman comedy. Even the American musical has seen the resuscitation of Plautus, as in Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Without Plautus and Terence to convey and amplify the conventions of New Comedy, the modern sitcom (situational comedy) simply would not exist today. The spirit of Roman drama is alive and well in the Western tradition.

FURTHER READING Boyle, A.J. An Introduction to Roman Tragedy. London: Routledge, 2006. Dover, K. Aristophanic Comedy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Easterling, P.E., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Classic Greek and Roman Drama Hunter, R. L. The New Comedy of Greece and Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Konstan, D. Roman Comedy. Ithaca: Cornell University, 1983. Segal, E. Roman Laughter: The Comedy of Plautus. Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1968. Storey, I.C. & Allen, A. A Guide to Ancient Greek Drama. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

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English Renaissance Drama William Kerwin

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats described the literature of the English Renaissance as possessing ‘‘the emotion of multitude.’’ Other critics have spoken of a ‘‘confluence,’’ a merging together of classical and native traditions. And the great Russian writer Mikhail Bakhtin, whose work celebrates and explores literature’s ‘‘polyphony,’’ associated the Renaissance in particular as a period of ‘‘carnival.’’ Each of these images aims in its own ways at something similar in the period: a quality of fullness, or even of excess, caused by the meeting of a variety of traditions. But for those living in England at the time, this fullness was not an entirely positive thing: it was, indeed, alternately exhilarating and terrifying. The latter part of that formulation may seem strange to a casual observer now, when the literature of the Renaissance, and especially the works of William Shakespeare, have achieved such iconic associations with tradition and established order. But the period was in fact one of an almost overwhelming instability. Theology, politics, education, economics, gender, and science all saw challenges to older systems of meaning, and the drama, that literary form so suited to the play of dialectic, was the form that best captured those conflicts and turned them into art, mingling idealism and terror. The display of European civilization that the idealistic young Miranda near the close of The Tempest calls a ‘‘brave new world’’ is to her seasoned and cynical father Prospero a gathering of sinners, including a ‘‘thing of darkness’’ for which he accepts responsibility.

THE STAGE OF HISTORY A medieval worldview that emphasized hierarchy and order was being met in England in the sixteenth century by more atomistic, individual, and protean

English Renaissance Drama challenges. Indeed Proteus, the Greek mythological character who could change shapes endlessly, might be the best personification of the sixteenth century English world, with its fluid social reality that seemed to many people very close to the world of the theater. ‘‘All the world’s a stage’’ says Shakespeare’s Jacques in As You Like It, and when Shakespeare wrote that line he conveyed a truism of the day: role-playing, or acting, was now the way people got on with life. The history of English Renaissance drama is inseparable from this historical moment, when what role a person played was suddenly a matter of choice and responsibility. Another version of this idea can be seen in Walter Ralegh’s poem ‘‘What is our life?’’ Our mirth the music of division; Our mothers’ wombs the tiring-houses be Where we are dressed for this short comedy. Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is, That sits and marks still who doth act amiss; Our graves that hide us from the searching sun Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest, Only we die in earnest—that’s no jest. What is our life? a play of passion. . .

Ralegh’s poem employs two of the great poetic moves of his day: he gives us the metaphor of life-as-theater, and he works through analogy, that trope that suggests parallel systems of order in different spheres of life. Ultimately, those two moves work against each other, as role-playing suggests instability and change, while analogy, with its dependence upon an underlying order or structure, intimates an overarching plan or system. The confrontation between innovation and order faced Englanders in many confusing ways, and one response they seem to have had was to head to the theater: from the founding of the first London public theater in 1567 to the closing of public theaters in 1642, more than fifty million visits were paid, in a city that in 1600 held two hundred thousand people. These audiences were spectators at, and players in, a multitude of dramatic revolutions. Offstage, the widest-ranging of those changes involved religion. The movements that ultimately led to what we now call the Reformation, accelerated by Martin Luther’s bold posting of his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg in 1517, obviously challenged the ways religion was organized, but these movements also challenged the ways thoughts were organized, and helped usher in a different kind of identity. Those who broke with Rome were united in rejecting the papacy and certain Catholic doctrines and practices, as they attempted to purify the faith and return to a more streamlined practice. But this movement soon splintered into numerous forms, which in England were primarily divided between a Catholic-looking Anglican Church, which continued the practice of top-down organization

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Western Drama through the Ages involving bishops, and more radical reformers eventually dubbed ‘‘Puritans,’’ who sought a more thorough rejection of Catholic forms. Following the Lutheran motto of ‘‘every man his own priest,’’ these more radical Protestants sought to purge the Christian faith of any impediment to an individual’s personal relationship to God. Because the Reformation emphasized a Christian’s inner experience, it helped foster the patterns of inwardness and individual responsibility that define the Renaissance. The invention of printing presses with moveable type allowed for an explosion in reading and ownership of books, a development that worked in parallel ways with the Reformation: many English homes now owned a bible, allowing private or family reading of scripture, and soon after that other books appeared in homes, fostering an expanding range of private reading experience. That technological shift, from manuscript to print, like all other shifts in the period, was inseparable from the seismic movements created by the Reformation. The growth of a book culture occurred simultaneously with other aspects of Renaissance intellectual life, including the movement known as humanism. This movement stressed the value of ancient texts and the potential of individuals to achieve an almost divine potential, and it produced a new culture of letters. Italian scholars and artists such as Pico della Mirandola, Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo helped promote the ambitious Pythagorean ideal that ‘‘man is the measure of all things,’’ and they saw the human individual as a chameleon-like creature who has the power either to descend to the level of beast or to rise to the status of an angel. Italian life in the fifteenth century was energized by an outpouring of these new ideas and experiments in both visual and literary arts. In the early sixteenth century English court of Henry VIII it was the literary arts that became transformed by Renaissance humanism. The first major landmarks involve the Latin writings of a few well-educated humanists, most notably Thomas More, whose 1516 Utopia was part of an exchange of ideas not within England but within a small coterie of humanists living across northern Europe. Interested in reform of all aspects of society, Utopia imagines a world governed reasonably and justly, even as it admits that such a world is literally a ‘‘no place.’’ These reforming instincts were directed at more attainable goals by later English humanists who created new educational institutions and curricula, and instituted the ways of learning that produced the great English dramatic flowering by expanding what counted as worthy in both subject and form. The use of classical models in schooling helped broaden the educational experience from the study of divinity to the study of the wide range of human experience, represented by authors such as Terence, Plautus, Seneca, Horace, Virgil, Cicero, and above all Ovid. This schooling emphasized learning Latin, and learning it well, but it also stressed a clarity of linguistic use in English, a development essential for the promotion of English as a language worthy of serious literary effort. A 1557 volume entitled Songs and

English Renaissance Drama Sonnets helped bring the continent’s poetic trends to England and legitimize English-language poetry. The triumph of the vernacular as the language of literature and the great poetry of the sixteenth century fundamentally shaped the dramatic movement beginning at this time. Transformations in religious and literary realms helped propel political revolutions as well. The Renaissance is often regarded as beginning in England in 1485 and ending in 1660, and each date marks a significant political evolution. The Battle of Bosworth Field began the Tudor dynasty, with its centralization of power and its great regal courts, to be dominated by the epic reigns of Henry VIII (1509–47) and Elizabeth I (1558–1603). The restoration of Charles II in 1660 ended the English Civil War’s experiment in republican government, but it also marked the end of untrammeled monarchy. From the consolidation of national power at the period’s beginning in 1485 through the overthrow and regicide of Charles I and the Stuart ruling family in 1649 and the return to the throne of his son eleven years later, questions of political rule dominated public life and provided constant subject matter for the stage. And in ‘‘real life’’ these questions were theatrical as well, because kings and their competitors self-consciously thought of them that way, and staged their identities and their power in royal processions, royal pronouncements, and in the case of Charles I even in royal executions. Elizabeth I understood that she herself was playing the role of monarch, saying ‘‘we princes. . .are set on stages in the sight and view of all the world,’’ and objected to the staging of Shakespeare’s Richard II, with its depiction of a monarch overthrown, saying ‘‘know ye not that I am Richard?’’ Her Stuart successor James I retreated to a more blunt defense of his power based on the alleged divine right of kings as part of a divinely ordained order, seeming to challenge this theatricality of kingship. The deposition and eventual execution of his son, however, demonstrates that the Stuart belief was far from universal, and this political example of the ideology of order dissolved under the pressures of more atomistic and modern forces. Nowhere were those changes more evident, and more influential, than in London, the center of the theater world and the center of the greatest economic, demographic, gender, and intellectual changes in Renaissance Europe. From a small city of 60,000 people in 1520, London grew to 200,000 in 1600 and 400,000 in 1650. With great shifts in ownership caused by the transfer of church lands to private ownership, and a large influx of rural workers who lost their lands to enclosure, both the number and wealth of London citizens was soaring. The discovery of the ‘‘New World’’ and an increase in foreign trade brought a host of new commodities of London wharves, and London shops and manufacturers boomed. Apprentices and vagrants made up part of the London crowd, and discontent among the former group led to numerous riots and attacks on foreigners. London had a bustling crime life, with thirteen jails or prisons for various

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Western Drama through the Ages categories of debtors or criminals. With so much new growth, wealth, poverty, and desperation joined together, it was almost impossible to maintain older social distinctions, though they were still asserted. William Harrison in 1577 famously outlined the four categories or ‘‘degrees’’ of people: gentlemen; citizens and burgesses; country yeomen; and commoners. But whether one fit the category of ‘‘gentlemen’’ depended not only upon birth but upon appearance: older distinctions governing who was permitted to wear what clothes—sumptuary laws—were reasserted by decrees but ignored on the street. If one could dress and comport oneself like a gentleman, then the category might be claimed, and ultimately, it was playing the role that made the role. The role-playing involved in gender in the English Renaissance presents a fascinating part of the cultural puzzle. The ideology of order and tradition was both put forth and challenged in the domestic sphere, where a man’s authority over his wife was asserted as the analogy to a king’s authority over his kingdom. The place of women in English Renaissance culture, the exception of Queen Elizabeth notwithstanding, was officially one of subordination, and when a woman asserted her authority against this hierarchy, she had to do so against a very formidable collection of forces. Whether this element of history actually moves in a different direction from national politics—that is, whether gender roles became more restrictive even as political, economic, and literary roles became more free—has been hotly contested by recent historians. Did women lose authority in the move toward more nuclear households? Or did strong women successfully resist that narrowing of their possible roles? Such women can be found in both history and literature: the number of women writing for publication grew slowly but steadily in the period, and women on the stage often spoke out for their sex. Playwrights in the period—an almost exclusively male group—returned over and over to fictional imaginings of such resistance. Resistance to centralizing power structures and ancient traditions took on very different—and frankly more successful—forms in the realm of what we would now call science. The period’s intellectual changes involved both a new culture of intellectual life and new ideas. At the start of the Tudor monarchy in 1485, England was an intellectual backwater, far behind continental Europe in almost every way; by the Restoration in 1660, the country was leading a broad array of scientific and philosophical disciplines, and the Royal Society, where scientists, or ‘‘virtuosi’’ as they were called, saw new theories debated with a rigorous scientific method. The intervening years had seen challenges to almost every discipline, not just in England but in the scholarly community as a whole, often leading to a complete inversion of received ideas. William Harvey decentered the idea of human physiology by arguing that the heart acts as a pump; new ideas of disease undermined Galenic conceptions of the body that had dominated European life since the Roman Empire; and Galileo inverted ideas of astronomical

English Renaissance Drama order by claiming that the sun, not the earth, was at the center of the system of planets. John Donne provides an encapsulation of how it felt for him to be experiencing the moment of old orders under assault. In a poem called ‘‘The Anniversaries,’’ he cries out that new ideas about the world are destroying comforting visions of balance: And new philosophy calls all in doubt: The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world’s spent, When in the planets and the firmament They seek so many new; they see that this Is crumbled out again to atomies. ‘Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation: Prince, subject; father, son, are things forgot, For every man alone thinks he hath got To be a phoenix, and that there can be None of that kind of which he is, but he.

This is a vision of the horrors of the new: the heavenly and the political, the physical and the psychic, all are what Hamlet calls ‘‘out of joint.’’ And perhaps the greatest fear here is fear of untrammeled individuality, of people thinking there is no ‘‘kind’’ that contains more than one ‘‘he.’’ Donne’s reaction to the new science condenses others’ reactions to the new worlds of church, state, literature, and marketplace—to the whole exciting but fearsome Renaissance world that seemed to take on a new script almost every day.

THE STAGE IN RENAISSANCE ENGLAND All of these ‘‘dramatic’’ social changes helped produce a more literal dramatic revolution, on the place of the stage itself. Renaissance English theater had a native and ancient tradition upon which to draw, a medieval inheritance that met in the middle of the sixteenth century with all the social changes discussed above, but especially the literary innovations of humanism with its new attention to classical authors and poetic form. The result was theater of a new kind, combining the spiritual energies of English traditions with the aspirations and innovations of the Renaissance. The result was the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries or near-contemporaries, including Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, John Marston, Thomas Dekker, John Ford, and Philip Massinger.

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Western Drama through the Ages Medieval legacies included the folk entertainment, the mystery play, and the morality play. Folk entertainment included longstanding traditions of music, dance, carnival parties, and partly submerged ancient rituals, as well as holiday celebrations and public displays of magic, swordsmanship, and juggling not too distant in feel, one might guess, from modern-day buskers. Like our street entertainers, these earlier performers had a dicey relationship with central authority, not because they directly challenged institutions of church or state but because their entertainment came from sources much older than those institutions. Mystery plays, on the other hand, were much more closely connected with the church: they were plays performed by different trade groups, or ‘‘mysteries,’’ and they concern themselves with the entire scope of the biblical story, from Creation to the Last Judgment. Generally performed in cycles of separate plays, the mysteries attempted to enact the Christian story of the human race. They were performed annually at the time of a church feast, such as Corpus Christi, and they were enormous public spectacles aimed at an entire city’s population. Four such cycles remain available to us, and they provide us with a drama that is both religious and social; the plays retell the biblical story but in local settings and dialects, which sometimes included some rather pointed social criticism. Mysteries lost some favor after the Reformation, as they were associated with Catholic traditions of iconography, but the Chester cycle continued until 1575, leaving open the possibility that a young Shakespeare might have seen such plays, with their grand sense of time and their combination of biblical and local characterization. The ‘‘Second Shepherds’ Play’’ from the cycle performed at Wakefield, in Yorkshire, provides a rich example of that mixture of religious instruction and local lyric intensity, in which minor characters such as the shepherds or Noah’s wife Gib come across as real—and vibrant— people. The Reformation promoted another dramatic form, that of the moral play (or the morality play). Moral plays are a different kind of religious drama: they retell not a biblical scene but the story of one imagined moment, cast as a struggle for a single Christian’s salvation as he is pulled between allegorical forces. Mankind and Everyman are two famous and illustrative examples: each has a title character on a path toward salvation who is temporarily drawn to sin. If mystery plays are vehicles of narrative, enacting in a local accent and costume a story that was well-known and considered timeless, moral plays are plays of argument. They provide very little of an aesthetics of realism; their strength is in their ability to present ideas on stage, and to foster a theater of dialectic. Moral plays are preachy and predictable, except for the character known generically as the Vice, a villain who always fails in his quest but who nevertheless gets all of the best lines. Humorous, witty, and seemingly free to mingle with the audience in ways other characters are not, the Vice character lived on in later plays in creations

English Renaissance Drama such as Shakespeare’s Iago, Richard III, Feste, Falstaff, or Edmund. Part comic and part devil, the moral play’s Vice character provided energy and physicality to the drama. By the middle of the sixteenth century, plays of ideas were beginning to venture further afield than did the traditional moral plays, as they began to build on the culture of dramatic dialectic to consider ideas other than a soul’s salvation. In 1562 Gorboduc, by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, retells the story of an ancient British king and the bloody struggle between his two sons to succeed him. Norton and Sackville were both involved in the law courts of London, and both were involved in the political debates of mid-century. They turned to the past to stage different approaches to the question of political theory, and the fact that their play was performed at court before Queen Elizabeth demonstrates the seriousness of their ambitions for theater. Like a moral play, Gorboduc explores abstract ideas, but the characters are drawn from history, adding an element of realism and social commentary not present in the earlier genre. Sackville and Norton were also innovators of form, introducing unrhymed or blank verse to the stage; they probably borrowed that innovation from the lyric poet Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey. This is an exemplary instance of the myriad times when playwrights drew upon the works of poets in the Renaissance, making their genre more powerful with the developments of the lyric. Sackville himself contributed lyric characterizations to the 1559 edition of the very popular A Mirror for Magistrates, a collection of verse monologues with political lessons. Theater was expanding its sources, incorporating more and more of the Renaissance’s innovations.

The First Theaters The gradual emergence of a new form required new public places. Drama had previously been performed in temporary spaces, or at venues normally for some other purpose, such as churches, markets, courts, homes, or inns. But in 1567 the first public theater, the Red Lion Theatre in Whitechapel, was built; in 1576 three other playhouses were established. Holding audiences of up to three thousand people, these playhouses offered a continuously changing menu of plays at a low price. Funding was lavished on costumes, but not on scenery, and not on scripts either, which were regarded as a much less valuable part of a company’s assets than its rich robes and dresses. English theatrical companies had an unusual social position: when sponsored by a member of the nobility, they maintained a great freedom, but without that protection they were legally classified as vagabonds. Plays were often performed at court, but the London public theaters—where the same plays were often staged—were located at the margins of society, in the suburbs and legally distinct ‘‘liberties’’ that also housed

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Western Drama through the Ages the houses of prostitution, the bear-baiting and cockfighting arenas, and other places of ill repute. Theater in the English Renaissance always had to fight for its legal survival, against London civic authorities who sought to restrict it and Puritans who sought to abolish it altogether. This ‘‘antitheatrical’’ movement had numerous famous examples, including a 1579 pamphlet by Stephen Gosson accusing the theater of promoting almost every vice, from sexual instability to laziness. His diatribe provoked a response by the nobleman Philip Sidney, whose Defense of Poesy declared all of the literary arts, including theater, as promoters of an heroic virtue. Sidney brought to the debate over theater’s social value all of the elegance and authority of Renaissance humanism, and while playwrights occasionally ran afoul of the law—especially for satire too close to the throne—theaters remained open, except for plague times, until 1642. At that time, at the onset of the great national civil war, the Puritan opposition to the stage finally won the day, deeming that theaters were ‘‘spectacles of pleasure, too commonly expressing lascivious mirth and levity.’’ It is more than slightly ironic that English Renaissance drama, now celebrated as the essence of English culture, had to struggle for its right to exist at the very high point of its creativity. With the establishment of public theaters and permanent acting companies in the 1570s and 1580s, the demand for plays was met by a group of highly educated men known as the ‘‘university wits.’’ Deeply educated in classical literature, they brought to their writing a reverence for authors such as Seneca in tragedy and Terrence and Plautus in comedy. Originality was less of an artistic goal than creative imitation, as authors turned to extant plays or stories and retold them in English, proud of rather than embarrassed by their wholesale borrowings. Formally, these early plays often retain a stiffness that shows these borrowings were not yet integrated to the local scene, but two plays in the 1580s, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, show native tradition and classical learning coming together in powerful and epoch-changing ways.

Combining Classical Learning and Native Tradition: Kyd and Marlowe The Spanish Tragedy draws on the tradition of the Roman writer Seneca and brings it into early modern Europe. Seneca’s genre was the revenge play, in which a victimized good man gradually becomes twisted by his attempts to find justice. The revenge play bears a central place in Renaissance English tragedy, and The Spanish Tragedy can be seen as a precursor of Hamlet, as well as revenge plays by Middleton, Webster, and Ford. Like many Renaissance plays, this one is difficult to date exactly, but it probably was first performed in the late 1580s

English Renaissance Drama and was first published in 1592, and was republished and quoted from so many times in the succeeding decades that its popularity is unquestionable. Kyd’s protagonist is the good old man Hieronimo, a Knight Marshall of Spain, who is unable to find justice for the murder of his son, Horatio. In act two he cries out, ‘‘in revenge my heart would find relief,’’ but corruption in the political elite makes any direct solution impossible. Driven to a frenzy that looks like madness and may be so, Hieronimo gradually learns to work within the cycles of violence and disguise to strike back, with breathtaking bloodiness, at the cast of characters around him. Kyd creates a character whose soliloquies bring something new to the stage—Hieronimo speaks passionately and at great length about his frustrations, and his thoughts and very identity seems to change during the course of his speeches in ways that no morality play character’s ever did. Hieronimo also becomes an actor and a theatrical producer, producing his revenge in the course of putting on a play within the play, an example of the metatheater that Shakespeare incorporated into so many of his plays, with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet being just two examples. Finally, The Spanish Tragedy creates an ambiguous moral as well as psychic universe, in which the right deed is no longer as clear-cut as in medieval drama—we are now seeing Renaissance skepticism, unsure of how justice or salvation are possible in a world gone astray. Christopher Marlowe continued that exploration of moral ambiguity, and he brought to the form of tragedy a poetry never seen before in English drama. A translator of Ovid’s Amores and the author of the short epic ‘‘Hero and Leander,’’ Marlowe brought into the theater what Ben Jonson latter dubbed ‘‘Marlowe’s mighty line.’’ Marlowe opens his first play, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, with a Prologue who announces a new era: From jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay, We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war, Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine Threatening the world with high astounding terms, And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword.

One can hear in these lines—in their disdain for ‘‘jigging veins’’ and ‘‘clownage,’’ and in their full-mouthed pleasure with ‘‘high astounding terms’’—a dismissal of much of previous attempts at drama in English. Marlowe moves us with poetry, displaying an ambition in verse only paralleled by the ambitions of his characters. His most famous and successful plays focus on a single aspiring central figure, whom critics have referred to as his ‘‘over-reachers,’’ but in their aspirations lie a beauty and a power that makes it difficult to respond to them only with moralizing judgments. Tamburlaine glories in military conquest;

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Western Drama through the Ages Doctor Faustus wants complete knowledge; Edward II is a king driven by sensuality; and The Jew of Malta is a self-defined ‘‘Machiavel,’’ or political villain, who wants ‘‘infinite riches in a little room.’’ All these characters teeter on the edge of self-parody, sounding at times heroic, at other times comic, and at other times tragic. The downfall of each echoes the morality play’s dismissal of a Vice character, but Marlowe first makes his protagonist noble, uncompromising, and above all passionate in ways that no Vice character ever was. Marlowe’s biography is so full of shadowy suggestions and spectacular events that he stands alone as a kind of ‘‘bad boy’’ of the period, embodying in his life much of the anarchic and self-destructive chaos of his protagonists.

Local Settings for English Drama Not all Renaissance dramatists set their plays in dramatically distant places. The genre of domestic tragedy combined local history with moral precepts and dramatic detail. The anonymous Arden of Faversham tells the story of Alice Arden’s infidelity, and the murder of her husband, with rich and lively local detail, creating a cast of vivid underworld characters as well as staging the aspirations of the local gentry. Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness offers a more moralizing look at a failed marriage, perhaps most interesting for the ways it captures Renaissance England’s obsessions with female chastity. The Witch of Edmonton by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, gives us the tragic history of a local witchcraft episode, combining the supernatural, the sociological, and the psychological. The 1590s saw a vogue for the English history play, which drew their material from chronicles that celebrated the English past, but were shaped by playwrights both to celebrate and question the English political system. That these history plays are often almost indistinguishable from tragedy demonstrates they are much more than patriotic celebration of order.

William Shakespeare Coming to the London stage a few years after Marlowe was William Shakespeare, and no chapter of this length, with an aim of introducing the broad scope of English drama in the Renaissance, can give more than the most cursory glimpse at his work. Perhaps one can begin by noting what Shakespeare did NOT do: he wrote no real city comedy (The Merry Wives of Windsor does not quite qualify), and with the exception of that play he did not write any plays set in contemporary London. His early career included work in comedy, tragedy, and especially English history plays—he wrote two groups of four plays each, ‘‘tetralogies,’’ exploring the English past and political philosophy. That interest in the limits and duties of central authority also defines Shakespeare’s tragedies, which cast a famous eye on psychic disintegration but also examine matters of

English Renaissance Drama state; one might find an illustrative example in Hamlet’s inwardness combined with the observation that ‘‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’’ Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, and all the other tragedies combine studies of individuals with studies of communal identity. The broad trajectory of Shakespeare’s career as an author of comedies moves from light to dark, though even early on, in plays such as The Taming of the Shrew and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, cruelty and caprice seem inseparable from the plots that end in marriage. Later comedies such as Twelfth Night and As You Like It seem most confidently to integrate the various sides of comic theater, while comedies such as The Merchant of Venice, Troilus and Cressida, and All’s Well That Ends Well barely seem comedies at all, having given over so much to portraying the presence of suffering and violence. Near the end of his career Shakespeare participated in a radical generic experiment— part of a vogue for other dramatists as well—labeled ‘‘tragicomedies’’ or ‘‘romances,’’ producing in The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, Pericles, and The Tempest plays that suspend some of the more realistic bounds governing the rest of his plays and that combine the staging of the suffering of his tragedies with the reconciliation of his comedies. Through it all, Shakespeare drew on all the social energies and literary experimentation described above: he combined humanistic learning with native forms such as moral play elements (especially the Vice); he participated in a new sense of inward life (even if he did not quite, as Harold Bloom has argued, ‘‘create the modern’’); he helped in the rigorous English examination of political authority; and he brought beautiful poetry to the stage.

Ben Jonson A third great poet-playwright who flourished at the end of the Elizabethan era was Ben Jonson. Jonson seemed at times to define himself against his great contemporary Shakespeare, most forcefully in the ways Jonson asserted the importance of following the theories often labeled ‘‘neo-classical,’’ but the two shared many things as well. Each was the son of a working class father, and a possessor of great social ambition; each was a great lyric poet; and each had a mastery over multi-plot structures. But perhaps most of all, each used the stage to revel in the powers of language; as Lovewit says in The Alchemist, ‘‘I love a teeming wit as I love my nourishment.’’ While Jonson did write tragedies, it was in comedy that this ‘‘teeming wit’’ really came to life. Jonson began writing ‘‘Comedies of Humors,’’ in which characters represent one human instinct or bodily type, and his comedies did not so much escape that paradigm as perfect it: his great comic characters are always types, but their language becomes so crammed with exuberant and sensual detail that being a type feels like a virtue. Here is The Alchemist’s Sir Epicure Mammon, describing his desire for wealth to a friend, and his hope that this is the day his fortune will arrive:

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Western Drama through the Ages Come on, sir. Now you set your foot on shore In Novo Orbe; here’s the rich Peru, And there within, sir, are the golden mines, Great Solomon’s Ophir! He was sailing to’t Three years, but we have reached it in ten months. This is the day wherein, to all my friends, I will pronounce the happy word, ‘‘Be rich; This day you shall be spectatissimi.’’

This poetry pushes us around and demands a fair bit—it helps to have the geography, book knowledge, and Latin skills to feel its emotional movement, and to arrive at the ‘‘exceedingly looked at’’ of the passage’s final word. It is above all extreme, and Jonson’s great comedies, like Marlowe’s tragedies, revel in extremity. Volpone; or, the Fox tells of a man who feigns mortal illness to prey upon the greed of those who would win his inheritance. Epicoene; or, the Silent Woman shows a man, Morose, driven by his hatred of noise, and his being beguiled by family who dress up a boy as an allegedly mute woman to be his perfect bride. The Alchemist features a trio of criminals who use the promises of alchemy to trick a host of greedy people. And Bartholomew Fair gives us a panorama of London types, joined by the festivity of the fair and by their own distinguishing absurdities. These comedies tell of con men and suckers, and usually end in the exposure of vice and greed, which suits Jonson’s stated goals of showing vice in order to dissuade us from it. But the joy of the play is in watching these sinners at play. Here we can see some of the conflicts in Jonson’s life: he is the poet of praise for ordered country traditions, and for integrity of life, but his plays succeed because he shows the exact opposite in the teeming and ambitious London underworld. Jonson published a folio volume of his writing in 1616 under the title Works, a presumptuous thing for a poet and playwright to do centuries before the privileged professional niche of Creative Writing: the term works was usually reserved for books in philosophy or theology, subjects acknowledged as weighty. This son of a bricklayer wanted to raise both himself and his craft above their origins.

The City Comedy The shift from Elizabethan to Jacobean drama saw a number of broad changes on the stage, including a new kind of satire, the city comedy. Renaissance English satire migrated from the page to the stage when church authorities banned the publication of verse satires after the genre became too violent for them to endure. ‘‘City comedy’’ describes a wide range of plays that focus upon London life and manners, especially of its new breed, the middle-class citizen. London, more than any individual person, becomes the main character in these plays. Aside from Jonson, the major figures in city comedy are Thomas Middleton and

English Renaissance Drama Thomas Dekker. While each wrote in other genres as well, their city comedy leaves us with a portrait of London as a venal but vital city. Middleton’s greatest contribution is The Chaste Maid of Cheapside, a fast-moving multi-plot play of London financial and sexual intrigue. The play opens in the home and shop of a goldsmith, YellowHammer, and people arrive, including the sleazy Sir Walter Whorehound, to court both the son and daughter, with the wealth of the shop the universal motive. A second household, the Touchwoods, is defined by its abundance of children; a third, the Kixes, is marred by childlessness; and a fourth, the Allwits, accepts Sir Walter Whorehound as the sexual father of all their children in exchange for his financial support. In all four plots, marriage and fertility are counters in a financial game, and while sex drives several characters, the real lust is for money. At play’s end the worst offenders are exposed and isolated, and the young couple undermines their parents’ attempts to stop their marriage, but even that union seems decidedly guided by material concern, with the man calling his love ‘‘the choicest spoil.’’ That emphasis on trading of the most intimate human actions can stand for the way city comedy in general sees commerce organizing life. A more festive example is Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, set in the home and shop of an energetic shoemaker, Simon Eyre, who eventually becomes the Mayor of London. Dekker gives us a rich and mostly loving portrait of shop, street, and royal court, with a love story involving an aristocratic man dressing as a shoemaker. The play praises the working class culture of the shop, and the virtue and social value of its workers. Dekker writes with the exuberance that defines so much Renaissance writing. But we see here, as we do in Middleton’s play, that any optimistic sense of native virtue is shadowed by the way trading determines all: Simon Eyre’s ultimate triumph has as much to do with his sneakiness as with his hearty virtue. A third example of the city comedy is a collaboration between Dekker and Middleton—and collaboration was an increasingly common occurrence in the seventeenth century—entitled The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cut-Purse. Based on the historical person Mary Firth, the play places this cross-dressing underworld dynamo within a culture of ‘‘roaring boys,’’ or rowdies, and makes her a superhero of virtue in a corrupt city. As in other city comedies, a loving thick description of London scenes makes up one side of the play, and the exposure of lustful and greedy citizens provides us with a second and much more ironic tone. This double feeling also characterizes the genre of tragicomedy or romance. This genre creates a world remote from the familiar, and depicts dangerous and passionate forces at work, only to solve the looming problems before they become tragic, usually through the intervention of an almost magical outside force. Near death experiences and happy endings—such a combination, and an open reliance upon artifice rather than character to conclude the plot, open up this genre to the charge of being aimed at professional success rather than aesthetic integrity. But at times the plays work very well, as can be seen in Shakespeare’s

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Western Drama through the Ages The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, and in some of the work of the prolific Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, working sometimes in tandem and sometimes independently, especially in Philaster and A King and No King.

Character in Renaissance Tragedy If during the seventeenth century comedy gradually lost an interest in character, tragedy retained that focus up until the closing of the theaters in 1642, even as it was shadowed by an increasing obsession with violence and moral decay. Shakespeare’s successors in writing great tragedies include John Webster and John Ford, each of whom creates spectacularly transgressive characters, straining to push the boundaries of the lurid, but also conveying emotion in remarkably original and complex poetry. Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi gives us a world in which the tragic title character suffers independently of any choices she makes; her brothers conspire first to madden her and then to kill her and her family. The play’s power comes from its articulation of evil, made more shocking in its contrast to the play’s title character. Her brother Ferdinand, making reference to medical treatments for anger, calls out: Rhubarb, oh, for rhubarb To purge this choler! Here’s the cursed day To prompt my memory, and here’t shall stick Till of her bleeding heart I make a sponge To wipe it out.

Before that prophesied murder takes place, Ferdinand subjects his sister to torment after torment, to an almost comical excess: Damn her! That body of hers, While that my blood ran pure in’t, was more worth Than that which thou wouldst comfort, called a soul. I will send her masques of common courtesans, Have her meat served up by bawds and ruffians, And, ‘cause she’ll needs be mad, I am resolved To remove [from] the common hospital All the mad folk, and place them near her lodging: There let them practice together, sing, and dance, And act their gambols to the full o’th’ moon.

Ferdinand’s sadistic fantasies here almost describe the theater of Webster and his contemporaries, striving as they do to hit ever higher notes of angry violence. John Ford’s tragedies are best represented by ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, the story of Giovanni and Isabella, a brother and sister who fall in love, and ultimately consummate their love, before a gory murder suicide, punctuated by Giovanni

English Renaissance Drama coming on stage with his sister’s ‘‘heart upon a dagger.’’ Imagine Romeo and Juliet on steroids. A similarly amplified feeling comes from what Cyril Tourneur does with the genre of the revenge tragedy: even if Shakespeare and Kyd had created orgies of blood, their Hamlet and Hieronimo were driven by a dream of justice, but in The Revenger’s Tragedy all moral center seems gone. Characters appear like moral play figures—the Duchess has evil sons named Ambitioso and Supervacuo—but no remnant of the good angel remains.

Women in Renaissance Drama All of these plays, in their sense of the violated woman as the primal sin, bring up the centrality of women within Renaissance drama. Sadly, there are very few contributions by women authors to English Renaissance drama, certainly no real-life counterpart to Virginia Woolf’s marvelous fantasy ‘‘Shakespeare’s Sister,’’ in which Woolf imagines a creative woman of the period destroyed by the complete absence of any ‘‘room of one’s one’’ in which to write. The women writers of the period were mostly aristocrats, and this is especially true in drama, which requires a broad network to actually produce a play. Perhaps that is why the first original (as opposed to translated) play by a woman is an example of ‘‘closet drama,’’ or theater written to be read. Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (published 1613), tells the story of the biblical queen’s struggle to assert herself and her opposition to her tyrant husband Herod. Most importantly in terms of Mariam’s connections with other Renaissance plays, her struggle is for speech, to maintain a ‘‘public voice,’’ not merely a domestic and subordinate one. If Renaissance drama has few women writers, it has a multitude of women who assert their voices and their wills, often with tragic results. Shakespeare’s women, from the tamed shrew of his early comedy to the stage-directing Paulina in The Winter’s Tale, fight for their right to speak; as Othello’s Emilia says to her husband Iago, who has told her to be quiet, ‘‘No, I will speak as liberal as the north!’’ In the comedies the central fear of the male characters is women escaping control, leading to an obsession with cuckholdry. In the tragedies, male control of women is at the center of the symbolic order, as well as of individual male identity, and from Titus Andronicus to The Duchess of Malfi we see the violent effects upon the lives of women of this symbolic centrality.

The Masque A final genre to note is the masque, a very different form of play. A courtly entertainment, the masque involved acting, music, and dance, as did traditional plays, but it also involved members of the audience as performers, and it relied on elaborate set and costume designs. One of the most famous is The Masque of Blackness, a collaboration between Ben Jonson and the Italian-influenced architect Inigo

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Western Drama through the Ages Jones, staged at the court of King James in 1605. A very dramatic spectacle, this is allegory even beyond that of the moral plays, meant to drive home the power of the ruling family and the virtue of England. The court members who participated in the masque included Queen Anne and eleven of her female companions, painted in blackface to represent women from Africa searching for a purer home, and they provide a rare instance of female actors on the Renaissance stage. The primary interest of these plays today is their clearly political and ideological lines, staging the court’s power and its connections to spectacle, as well as to definitions of race and gender. Jonson ultimately quarreled with Jones over what he saw as the victory of spectacle over language, and the masque’s emphasis upon the visual and the ornate is a foreshadowing of some of the developments in English Renaissance drama in the reign of Charles I, leading up to the closing of the theaters in 1642. The drama becomes increasingly baroque and self-reflexive. Despite contrary examples such as the work of Philip Massinger and James Shirley, it is difficult not to feel that the powers of the English Renaissance stage are fading. But the story of Renaissance drama has continued, in four centuries of performances and readings. No plays in the Western dramatic tradition have been staged as often as these. Shakespeare’s plays have been produced in every corner of the world, especially in times of political tumult, and are a Rorschach test of a culture’s concerns and sensibilities. The ability of Renaissance drama to capture conflict and aspiration gives it a collection of voices that still speak to us, if we listen.

FURTHER READING Barker, Simon, and Hilary Hinds, eds. The Routledge Anthology of Renaissance Drama. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Maus, eds. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton, 1997. Kinney, Arthur, ed. Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.


French Neoclassical Drama Andrew Ade

THE EARLY FRENCH PROFESSIONAL THEATER AND THE ASCENDANCY OF CLASSICISM Until its recent decline, the theater held a place of prominence in France’s cultural identity. No segment of French theater history enjoyed more lasting prestige than the seventeenth century enterprise of perfecting plays of classical design—works that have been repertory staples of the subsidized national theaters ever since. What began as an academic ideal became the artistic reflection of a monarchy devoted to the consistent exercise of absolute authority and the proliferation of beauty. As historian Jacques Barzun describes it, the long-reigning Louis XIV stared down rebellious nobles and ambitious powerbrokers by promoting a regulatory system of court etiquette, which transformed court life into a rehearsed spectacle of ritualized ceremony. By repositioning the palace community in a configuration of mutual surveillance, the King kept the nobles and state servants perpetually in his view and, equally important, visible to each other. He diverted them with an endless program of high-toned entertainments, including ballets, masques, and new plays by the country’s most accomplished dramatists. Stealing focus in this ‘‘fusion of revelry and rivalry’’ was the King himself, who made the private habits of royal daily life (rising, dressing, eating, retiring) a form of giving audience to a select rotating list of favored courtiers. ‘‘Life at the court of Louis XIV was a daily drama in which he played the lead,’’ concludes Barzun, with the resplendent suburban Palace of Versailles as its theater. The careers and reputations of France’s first professional actors, managers, and playwrights depended to a large degree on royal and aristocratic recognition, and by the mid-1600s their work aimed for a standard of execution to match the taste

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Western Drama through the Ages of their most privileged audiences. The epithets ‘‘Golden Age’’ and ‘‘Great Century,’’ which rightly identify a high water mark for playwriting of a particular mode, also imply, misleadingly, a uniformity of style, stage convention, and dramatic purpose across the spectrum of coexisting theatrical endeavors. In truth, the history of French drama and performance between 1550 and 1700 is the confluence of numerous theatrical sources, native and foreign, esoteric and popular, occurring within a movement toward an official theater to represent a singular taste—i.e., that of the monarch and, by extension, the nation. Yet this movement met with continual resistance from artists and audiences alike, who had their own preferences for, and investments in, the living, interactive art of the theater. In the end, an approved dramatic canon triumphed, but at the cost of creating a sustained cultural divide of endorsement or disenfranchisement. Understanding the history of one requires an acknowledgement of the other, with a balanced regard for the techniques of poetic composition and the available material conditions of presentation.

THEATERS, CONVENTIONS, AND COMPANIES Theaters To some degree, we can attribute the remarkable rise and eventual dominance of French classical drama to policy decisions by sixteenth century authorities to control and protect sacred plays (myste`res), which served to keep the French people connected to the Catholic Church. In 1518, Franc¸ois I granted a monopoly on all play performances of any kind, in Paris and its suburbs, to a century-old acting society, la Confre´rie de la Passion et Re´surrection de Notre-Seigneur, which, by a 1402 royal charter, had already enjoyed exclusive rights to all religious plays in the capital. Headquartered in a hall in the hospital of l’E´glise de la Trinite´, the Confre´rie also staged their mystery plays on the church steps and in street processions. In time the crowd-pleasing farce material, with which they padded the mysteries, and the profane plays they gave to keep their audiences interested began to worry both church and city officials with the prospect of public disorder. In late 1548, after moving operations into a newly constructed building just north of the central city market, the Confre´ rie suffered a setback: the judicial assembly known as le Parlement de Paris banned it from giving further performances of the sacred mystery plays but allowed it to present ‘‘other secular, honest and decent mysteries, provided that there is in them no offence or insult to anyone’’; the Confre´rie, moreover, could keep their monopoly on all theater productions in Paris. Now confined to secular drama, the Confre´rie struggled to generate a new repertoire, but by the late 1580s it had little choice but to operate its theater

French Neoclassical Drama as a receiving house for visiting productions and arranged seasons by independent companies. It lost a crucial revenue source when, in 1595, the Parlement ended the Confre´rie’s monopoly on city play performances, thereby releasing theater troupes and open-air performers from their obligation to pay them permit fees. Further weakening the group’s autonomy, beginning December, 1629, the royal company Les Come´diens du Roi (The King’s Players) won first option on the theater space, regardless of other more lucrative bookings. Until an edict dissolved the Confre´rie in 1676, it existed largely as a hamstrung theater landlord. The theater building the Confre´rie operated in between 1548 and 1676 was known as the Hoˆtel de Bourgogne, whose design, as W.L. Wiley has suggested, stuck closely to the dimensions of their original space in the Hoˆpital de la Trinite´, without regard for comfort or sightlines. A rectangular structure with a raised stage at one end—without scenery, roughly 41 feet wide and 34 feet deep—and featuring a shallow upper stage at the back, the Bourgogne could accommodate over one thousand spectators, either standing or seated on benches in the parterre, in stage-level private boxes (loges) on either side, or on a raked amphithe´aˆtre in the far back, rising to gallery seating in ‘‘the gods.’’ Every Parisian theater of the period, including the private court theaters at the Louvre (Petit Bourbon) and Tuileries Palace (Salle des machines), assumed this boxed architectural plan; the more amenable thrust platform stage of the rounded London playhouses was never imitated in France. At its simplest, the Bourgogne stage consisted of a bare playing area with tapestries hanging along the stage perimeter. Plays of romantic adventure, whose action unfolds in an improbable sequence of different locations, and adaptations of classical stories involving the skyward appearance of a mythological character, required painted drops, compressed compartment sets, and complicated mechanical devices. Surviving sketches by the Bourgogne’s master set designer Laurent Mahelot reveal that the moveable mansions of medieval set design (de´cor simultane´) persisted into the first decades of the seventeenth century, bringing together a play’s multiple locations into a single comprehensive glance. By the 1640s, Italian-influenced design replaced the compartments with backdrops and wing flats to transform the space into a Serlian geometric perspective. Costuming was lavish and ornate, with only sparse attention to the historical period of the play action, and were usually the responsibility and property of the actors themselves. Performances took place in the afternoons, lighted by chandelier candles, and often featured live music by a small group of musicians. In stark contrast to English theater custom, actresses, such as Rachel Tre´peau, Marie Venier, and her sister Colombe, were permitted to perform women’s roles in the decorous poetic plays (though not in the ribald farces) at the Bourgogne from the first years of the seventeenth century, having already appeared on stage in the 1590s with troupes touring the provinces.

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Western Drama through the Ages None of the Hoˆtel de Bourgogne’s rival houses during this period originated as public theaters. They were instead converted tennis courts (jeux de paume), elongated wooden structures with tile roofs and side entrances from the courtyard leading to the street. The most prominent of these, second only to the Bourgogne in prestige, was the The´aˆtre du Marais, situated less than a mile west, and which opened in 1634. Many of the most successful playwrights of the age premiered their work at the Marais, beginning with Corneille, Mairet, and Tristan L’Hermite. Theater historians believe the Marais introduced the first stage curtain, perhaps for the hit production of Le Cid (1637), which preceded the curtain installed at the private Palais-Cardinal theater (later renamed the Palais-Royal), built by Cardinal de Richelieu in 1641. The upper-class practice of taking seats on the stage itself, in full view of the house, and thus reducing the available playing area for the actors, may also have begun here with this production. When the Marais burned to the ground during a performance in 1644, its proprietors quickly rebuilt it with a enlarged stage and added box seating—business-savvy improvements that prompted the Bourgogne to remodel in kind in 1647. Molie` re’s company, L’Illustre The´aˆtre, also made their first home in a leased tennis court structure (but on the Left Bank) in 1643. Far from viewing these performance spaces as permanent headquarters, actors and playwrights moved with some regularity among all three theaters in response to artistic and administrative changes.

Italian Theater Companies No account of the diverse seventeenth century theater world would be complete without acknowledging two other important centers of activity, both of which found their way into the fashionable public theaters mentioned above. The first were the Italian companies that had originally performed at the French court in Blois in 1572 by invitation of Charles IX and later by his brother Henry III, whose powerful Florentine mother Catherine de Me´ dici had already exposed them to productions of translated Italian plays. These troupes, notably I Gelosi, played unrivaled in France from 1577 to 1599, whether giving command performances or touring the provinces, where they also worked as street mountebanks. While their repertoire embraced everything from tragedy to farce, their specialty was commedia dell’arte, built around a set of stock characters (Arlecchino, Pulcinella, Scaramuccia, Pantalone, Columbine, Scapini), whose predictable behaviors and artful physical expression in countless permutations of the same story made their Italian-language plays delightfully comprehensible. (The influence of these character types on French drama is later evident in comedies by Rotrou, Corneille, and Molie` re.) Although they enjoyed royal protection, the Italians ran up repeatedly against Paris authorities who considered them

French Neoclassical Drama purveyors of debauchery. After 1599, the Italian troupes began renting out the Hoˆtel de Bourgogne for regular shows. The wife of the Gelosi leader, Isabella Andreini, made a particularly strong impression there in 1603 before her untimely death on her return trip home later that year. In 1660, Louis XIV permitted troupe leader Fiorilli to establish a The´aˆtre Italien in Paris, where they performed until 1697.

Public Entertainers The other major element to insinuate its way into the theaters was the homegrown entertainment found in the city streets, squares, and fairgrounds. France’s earliest public entertainers may have been born of urban commercial activity— stall sellers, seasonal fair traders, and open-air vendors, aggressively vying to win customers and outbid their competition through amusing monologues and playful harangues that approached dialogue scenes. Paris’s natural venues for aspiring stage performers were the two fairgrounds for the annual city fairs, the Saint Germain (late winter) and Saint Laurent (summer). Acrobats tumbled and actors did satirical routines (parades) on temporary platform stages near the market pavilions. There as elsewhere in the city, certain performers entertained in order to prime crowds into buying questionable herbal remedies. The most famous of these ope´ rateurs, Antoine Girard, hawked his brother’s cure-all medicines on a trestle-stage in the Place Dauphine, a square just off the Pont Neuf, to great success between 1618 and 1626. Appearing in his trademark large pliable hat that could take a number of different shapes, Girard embodied the comic persona of ‘‘Tabarin’’ to deliver a variety of entertainments on humorous subjects, grouped as ‘‘Questions,’’ ‘‘Preambles,’’ and ‘‘Fantasies et Dialogues.’’ Girard varied his medicine show by performing original farces opposite his wife and brother, each masked and acting the fixed three roles of valet, mistress and master. Although there is no record of Girard performing in the Paris theaters, the Come´diens du Roi may have played his short, crudely constructed ‘‘farces tabarinesques’’ at the Hoˆtel de Bourgogne, where the most popular offering between 1600 and 1630 was the rough, bawdy show at the end of every bill. During those decades, each of their three leading farceurs, Robert Gue´rin (whose acting name was Gros Guillaume), Henri Legrand (Turlupin), and Hugues Gue´ru (GaultierGarguille)—the first with a floured face, the second masked, and the third bearded—incarnated a distinct, fixed character type of his own creation, as the native French equivalents of the commedia players who alternated rental of the Hoˆtel de Bourgogne in this period. Because of their capacity to improvise asides and physical gags, it fell to them during intervals or delays to perform songs or spar with an unruly parterre crowd to keep up interest and restore quiet.

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Western Drama through the Ages Most successful of all in the business of audience management was company member Nicolas Des Lauriers, who had started his career performing on outdoor trestle-stages before joining the Come´diens du Roi under the stage name ‘‘Bruscambille.’’ From 1609 to 1620, Des Lauriers came to the front of the open set stage to regale the incoming audience with original comic discourses on grand and mundane topics, which included a hymn to spittle, an appreciation of cabbage, and a reflection on gout. These witty pre-show speeches also met with a wide readership from three published collections of ‘‘fantasies,’’ ‘‘harangues,’’ and ‘‘prologues’’ in 1612 and 1615. Des Lauriers used this stage pulpit to promote the value of theater itself, reminding the audience of its honored role in ancient cultures, the actor’s usefulness to society, the qualitative difference between the noble come´dien and the trivial bouffon or baˆ teleur, the art of stage declamation as essential speech training for lawyers, and the benefits of attending finer comedies over degrading farces. His ‘‘Prologue on Impatience,’’ for instance, is a comeuppance for hooligans who goad the audience into riotous protests to force the performances to start early, and ‘‘Against Censors’’ inveighs against suspecting civic watchdogs who monitor the actors’ work. Taken together, these prologues amount to an animated defense of theatergoing and the acting profession. The stage work of Des Lauriers and the Bourgogne troupe as a whole evidences the dual nature of the nascent professional theater in France during the opening decades of the seventeenth century. Performers had to develop the capacity for both playful and reproving intimacy with the spectator in their struggle to maintain the audience’s engagement in the play at hand. The financial necessity of performing vulgar farce, however, held the troupe’s aspirations toward a higher art of verse plays in check. These conditions had defeated Valleran Le Conte, the leader of the Come´diens du Roi and France’s first professional actor, after setting up operations at the Bourgogne in 1599. Though greatly respected by his peers, Valleran failed to win Parisian audiences over to the more ambitious tragedies and comedies. His sharp comedic talents may have made him his own worst enemy: Thomas Platter, a Swiss medical student visiting Paris that year, noted the enthusiastic reception Valleran received for his encore performance after the dignified tragedy, in which he improvised jokes on the events and gossip of the day, somewhat like the stand-up television talk-show hosts of our own day. Within a year, his audience made clear their preference for the coarser, smuttier joke material, and Valleran, after relinquishing the bill to the farceurs, finished out his short, uneven career in minor Paris engagements and provincial tours. Between the charm of the Italian players and the popularity of the Bourgogne comics, Paris’s professional theater survived for the first third of the century principally on its ability to generate laughs.

French Neoclassical Drama

CLASSICAL IMITATIONS AND GENRES Whereas farce immediately connected with the widest audience, the highminded verse plays in which Valleran and his troupe desired to specialize gradually drew support from the worlds of academic study, wealth and leisure, and royal and political power. The emerging French classical theater would henceforth bear the official imprimatur and the class values of these elite circles of privilege. In 1549, the year following the construction of the Hoˆtel de Bourgogne and the Parlement order forbidding the Confre´rie to stage sacred plays, the Ple´iade poet Joachim du Bellay, in his watershed treatise La Deffense et illustration de la langue franc¸oyse, urged future French dramatic poets to turn away from medieval farces and morality plays and to restore comedy and tragedy to their ancient dignity, directing them to take as their ‘‘Archetypes’’ the surviving plays of Greece and Rome. For the next two centuries, French writers would debate the fitness of these models for a new era of dramatic art, struggling all the while to understand and enforce the dictates of classical authority. Humanist scholars had only recently laid the groundwork for the imitation of recovered ancient play scripts. In the 1540s, George Buchanan and Marc Antoine de Muret wrote both Latin translations of ancient Greek plays and original plays in Latin, while Lazare de Baı¨f, Charles Estienne, Thomas Sebillet, and Jean de Pe´ruse translated Sophocles, Euripides, and recent Italian dramatists into French. High school and university students read the masters of Roman comedy (Plautus and Terence) and tragedy (Seneca) as part of their Latin curriculum, and on occasion had permission to stage them on the school grounds. One such student, Etienne Jodelle, at the age of twenty-one, composed both the first regular French comedy (Euge`ne) and regular French tragedy (Cle´opaˆtre captive) between 1552 and 1553. The former received a courtyard production at the Colle`ge de Boncourt; the latter, a command performance for Henri II at the Hoˆtel de Reims. Cle´opaˆtre, written in alexandrines and decasyllables, exhibited the formal components of Senecan tragedy, including a lengthy opening monologue, dialogue scenes of alternating laments, and a chorus, yet it had little in the way of characterization or dramatized situation. Euge`ne, a verse satire of a corrupt cleric, was similarly limited in its observance of Roman comedy. Jodelle’s work reveals a dutiful, if cursory, regard not only for classical texts but also for the Greek, Latin, and Italian dramatic criticism—and the subsequent French commentary—that was known at the time. Renaissance French critics relied heavily on the Late Classical writers Diomedes and Horace (whose Ars Poetica received a French translation by Jacques Peletier du Mans in 1545), and especially on the fourth century Roman grammarians Evanthius and Aelius Donatus, whose descriptive poetics assumed the importance of normative rules. Although Jules-Ce´sar Scaliger would introduce Aristotle’s hitherto unknown Poetics in his

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Western Drama through the Ages massive seven-part survey of poetic practice, Poetices Libri Septem (posthumously published in Lyon in 1561), Aristotelian ideas scarcely influenced the current of French criticism until the advent of Ludovico Castelvetro’s Italian commentary a decade later. (Surprisingly, no French translation of Aristotle’s Poetics existed before Le Sieur de Norville’s La Poe´tique d’Aristote, traduite du grec in 1671; Andre´ Dacier’s own La Poe´tique d’Aristote followed in 1692.)

Comedy The French humanists’ principal concerns with the ancients centered on their genre criticism—i.e., the analytic means to determine what constitutes a legitimate tragedy or comedy. Playwrights and critics alike looked to the prescriptive requirements stipulated by these experts to know how to construct a play, how to denounce a play, and how to defend a play. Risk-taking playwrights in particular participated in the theater debates in two ways: for comedies, they could provide a witty prologue that explained their innovations and their philosophical stance on the genre; for tragedies, they could attach to the published script a preface that argued seriously their specific beliefs about the aims of dramatic art. The early writers of French comedy, therefore, proceeded from received ideas that the play proper consists of a setup of the fictional plot (protasis), a complication of the plot (epitasis), and the plot’s sudden turn for the best (catastrophe), all distributed over five acts; it opens with a prologue speech exterior to the action but has no chorus; comedy depicts the lives of average men and women, who speak in easy metered verse that suggests everyday language, and who exhibit behavior consonant with their ‘‘true’’ (i.e., class-determined) nature. Horace, Donatus, and Scaliger unanimously championed the six Roman plays of Terence as the best models for comedy. French comedies in the wake of Jodelle, like Jacques Grevin’s La Tre´sorie`re (1559) and Les Esbahis (1561), and Jean de la Taille’s Les Corrivaux (1562)—cited as the first original comedy in French prose—sought to reconcile the properties of ancient comedy with the needs of the contemporary stage. Other noteworthy comedies of the period include Odet de Turnebe´ ’s Les Contens (1580), Francois d’Amboise’s Les Ne´apolitaines (1584), Jean Godard’s Les De´guisez (1594), Pierre Troterel’s Les Corrivaux (1612) and Gilette (1617), Adrien de Montluc’s La Come´edie des proverbes (1616), and Jean Claveret’s L’Esprit fort (1629), the first French comedy of manners. A fascinating variant of French comedy grew out of the Hoˆtel de Bourgogne’s teasing prologue routines on the business of theater and, at the same time, exploited the baroque construct called le the´aˆtre dans le the´aˆtre (the play-withina-play), first introduced in Balthazar Baro’s Celinde (1629). N. Gougenot’s La Come´ die des come´ diens (1632), written expressly for the Come´ diens du Roi, stretches a false cancellation announcement over two full acts before starting the

French Neoclassical Drama main three-act play, entitled La Courtisane. The troupe manager’s opening speech gives over to staged chaos, during which he settles disputes among the entire company of thirteen and even recruits a new actor to play the young lover role, until he can lead them off to start La Courtisane. As the backstage crisis gives no hint of its fictive nature, it rises to theatrical trompe l’oeil; more ingenious, Gougenot has the actors playing fictionalized versions of themselves, which lends them a heightened stage reality. Some months later, the rival company led by Montdory premiered its own Come´die des come´diens at the The´aˆtre de la Fontaine, a newly outfitted tenniscourt theater. Its author, Georges de Scude´ry, also predicated it on the troupe’s efforts to resolve business and personal matters before performing a short play, L’Amour cache´ par l’Amour, but here Montdory complains that his actors insist on performing as though they were a different troupe altogether, working in Lyon under new stage names, no less. He soon capitulates, and the actors carry out their fanciful impersonation with such skill that Montdory finally joins them out of newfound appreciation for the acting profession. Scude´ry’s Come´die des come´diens has the actors playing at several removes from their audience, as a way to showcase their talent and to celebrate the enchanting paradoxical nature of theater. Unfortunately, these two self-conscious, self-referential plays appeared at a time of increasing support for illusionistic, representational theater. A casualty of classicism, the multi-level, metatheatrical French play would not win popular and critical acceptance until the twentieth century.

Tragedy The gestation of French tragedy proved even more controversial, insofar as its ontological nature was harder to agree upon, its properties more difficult to ascertain, and its form more stressful to achieve. The late classical critics had delineated tragedy as the essential opposite of comedy: its plot, with a basis in history or mythology, must have a beginning, a middle, and an end; it begins in calm but ends in terrible calamity, with death and/or exile; its characters are high-born, powerful, and speak weighty sentiments in poetic verse; it has no prologue speech but assigns a chorus to deliver solemn moral truths about human existence after each of the five acts. With the late sixteenth-century infusion of Aristotelian ideas, French tragic composition had to negotiate additional principles of complex plotting: peripety (the reversal of a character’s fortunes), recognition (a character’s change from ignorance to knowledge), and plot resolution, created through the plot itself and not by improbable or external means such as dei ex machina. Plot, character, thought, and diction had to blend into an organic whole, so as to elicit pity and fear, only to purge them in a satisfying dramatic conclusion. It is hardly surprising, then, that efforts to meet these standards led to a variety of offshoot tragic forms and, necessarily, creative defenses for them. The

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Western Drama through the Ages publication of The´odore de Be`ze’s Abraham sacrifiant (1550), subsequent to its student production in Lausanne, Switzerland, inaugurated the subgenre of biblical tragedy in France. This new type of sacred drama, which essentially imposed ancient Greek tragic structure onto Judeo-Christian story material, was almost exclusively the work of Protestant writers who believed in its potential moral power. It enjoyed a late-sixteenth-century vogue, encompassing Louis des Masures’s Tragedies saintes (1566), Andre´ de Rivaudeau’s Aman, tragedie saincte (1566), Jean de la Taille’s Sau¨l le furieux (1572) and La Famine (1573), Robert Garnier’s Juives (1583), Antoine de Montchrestien’s Aman (1601) and David (1601), and Pierre de Nancel’s trilogy Dina, Josue´, De´bora (1606), and had brief revivals before undergoing Racinian refinement in Esther (1689) and Athalie (1691). For Sau¨l le furieux, its author provided a landmark theoretical preface on tragedy in general, which drew on his fervor for Greek and Roman critics and for new plays made ‘‘in the mold of the ancients.’’ In ‘‘De l’art de la Trage´die,’’ La Taille repeats various Horatian dicta, including five-act division, the necessity of keeping violence offstage for purposes of decorum, and of introducing the story in medias res. His endorsement of Aristotelian ideas, such as the need to move audiences to pity and fear and to avoid the ‘‘cold’’ subjects of excessively evil or saintly heroes, suggests that he already knew of Scaliger’s and perhaps Castelvetro’s recent commentaries. Most intriguing is his statement, ‘‘The history or play must always be performed within a single day, at a single time and in a single place.’’ La Taille’s expansion of Aristotle’s unity of action and preferred dramatic time span of a single day, to a tripartite structural ideal, marked French criticism’s first step toward the establishment of the three unities (action, time, place) that would epitomize classical theory. Proponents of tragedy were eager to promote its moral didacticism and aesthetic pleasures. Important works include Jacques Gre´vin’s La Mort de Ce´ sar (1561), Antoine de Montchrestien’s Hector (1604), Alexandre Hardy’s Mariamne (1610), Tristan L’Hermite’s La Mariamne (1630) and La Mort de Se´ne`que (1644), Jean Mairet’s La Sophonisbe (1634), and Jean de Rotrou’s Hercule Mourant (1634) and Saint Genest (1645). French tragedies before 1630 were stubbornly Senecan in form and style: rich in imagery and epigram but somewhat lifeless in characterization and obtuse in plot. Their failure to make their choruses integral to the action led to its disappearance during the early 1600s. Virtually every French tragedy, however, took an ancient story as its subject, one notable exception being Montchrestien’s La Reine d’E´cosse (1601) on the death of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Tragicomedy Playwrights’ growing resistance to the generic constraints—and audiences’ waning interest in the sober tragic stories—gave momentum to a second variation:

French Neoclassical Drama tragicomedy. Ostensibly a hybrid of tragedy and comedy, it was in practice a play of romantic adventure, having a possibly heroic central character, who, after weathering certain distressing incidents, meets with a happy ending. To the extent that Aristotle, Horace, and Donatus had acknowledged that some ancient plays deviate from the parameters of tragic construction, many French dramatists felt justified in exploring tragicomedy as the form best suited to stories that need to transgress the severe limits of a single day’s duration and the rigid separation of serious and commonplace events. The first French tragicomedy proved to be enduringly popular: Robert Garnier’s Bradamante (1582) presents the story of a warrior-maiden who, by Charlemagne’s decision, must marry the man who defeats her in arena competition, only to win the man she loves in the end after losing to (she thinks) a stranger. The popular success of Bradamante guarantied tragicomedy’s place in the theaters, and Garnier’s effective metrical pattern in alexandrines (12 syllables) and rhyming couplets became thereafter the standard for all French dramatic composition. Among the most celebrated French tragicomedies are Jean de Schelandre’s reworked Tyr et Sidon (1628), Scude´ry’s L’Amour tyrannique (1638), Rotrou’s Don Bernard de Cabre`re (1647), and Corneille’s Don Sanche d’Aragon (1649). The first type of tragicomedy to win public favor after 1600 was pastoral tragicomedy—a mid-sixteenth-century Italian concoction, perfected by Torquato Tasso and Giovanni Battista Guarini. It conjured a fantasy world of archetypal tender lovers in romantic peril, within a mood of rustic harmony, overseen by divine management. Tasso and Guarini invested the pastoral drama with the classical features of five-act structure, a chorus, and a prologue speech in the manner of Plautus’s comedies, i.e., given by a mythical or allegorical character such as ‘‘Cupid,’’ ‘‘Night,’’ ‘‘Dawn,’’ or even an Arcadian river. Guarini, author of the benchmark pastoral tragicomedy Il Pastor Fido (1590), wrote a spirited defense of all tragicomedy in Compendio della poesia tragicomica (1599), championing it for avoiding the excesses of both tragedy and comedy, and for purging the audience’s melancholy with delight. These fussy, fanciful Italian plays, mixing the bucolic with the supernatural, found immediate favor with fashionable French audiences who swooned over the pastoral elements in The´ophile de Viau’s tragedy Pyrame et Thisbe´ (1621). Pastoral tragicomedy’s propensity for supernatural characters, who appear in spectacularly staged vignettes on the theater’s upper stage, gave rise to the ‘‘machine play,’’ the popular subgenre of special-effects theater. It fell to a young writer of pastoral tragicomedy, de Viau’s prote´ge´ Jean Mairet, to ignite serious interest in establishing an authoritative classical paradigm for French theater. In his 1631 ‘‘Pre´face’’ to Silvanire, ou la Morte-vive (1630), Mairet, inspired by his Italian predecessors, resolved to hold to the ancient models so precisely as to bring an original French tragicomedy ‘‘to its perfection.’’ (He would

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Western Drama through the Ages later realize this objective in his acclaimed Sophonisbe (1634), considered the first regular French classical tragedy.) He calls limiting the duration of dramatic action to a single day ‘‘one of the fundamental laws of the theater’’; remarkably, he backs this claim with the (incorrect) assertion that the ancient dramatists never failed to do so. Mairet’s self-assured manifesto had an immediate effect on French classicism, in that it elevated the two long-standing poetic principles of propriety (la biense´ance) and verisimilitude (la vraisemblance) to the essential watchwords of correct dramatic composition. Fellow classicists like Jean Chapelain shared Mairet’s belief that propriety’s demand for appropriately rendered speech and action—i.e., suited to the social type—in turn becomes the basis for a play’s verisimilitude—i.e., its overall believability as a probable action. Carrying further Mairet’s argument, they were now able to posit the three unities of action, time, and place. By 1635, when Cardinal Richelieu, himself a theater and Italian arts enthusiast, founded the forty-member Acade´mie franc¸aise to perfect the French language, charter member Chapelain (among others) had enshrined propriety, verisimilitude, and the three unities as indissociable conditions for manifesting true and regular drama. Although it would not go completely unchallenged, this daunting formulation created a long-lasting ‘‘official’’ view of drama that would both glorify and torment its best practitioners at work in an increasingly politicized literary world.

` RE CORNEILLE, RACINE, MOLIE Pierre Corneille The mid-seventeenth century call for regularity shaped the practices of the three giants of the French theater, whose names would variously become identified with neo-classicism. The first was Pierre Corneille (1606–84), a native of Rouen, who had trained in law and administration before undertaking a theater career. At 23, he joined forces with a traveling troupe, run by the up-and-coming actor Montdory, to provide them new plays to offer the growing Parisian audience. Nearly all his plays in the first half of his career premiered with this company at their theatrical base, the The´aˆtre du Marais. After workmanlike efforts exploring dramatic form in comedy, tragicomedy, and tragedy, he had a notable success in L’Illusion comique (1636), an ingeniously convoluted play that boasted ‘‘so many irregularities that it is not worth considering it.’’ Designed as a tragedy inside a comedy inside a magical frame story, with a coup de the´aˆ tre revelation of a play-within-the-play only in the last major speech, L’Illusion appears initially to express baroque themes of deception, intrigue, and world instability, through the familiar episodic adventure, love tangle, and onstage violence of tragicomedy. Only at the end do we grasp that Corneille had all along been equating the illusion

French Neoclassical Drama of life with that of the commercial theater, and that, despite our anxieties, the world has its own sense of order and resolution and inclines toward happiness. Although Corneille freely confessed that L’Illusion was a work ‘‘of bizarre and extravagant invention,’’ he declared it to be of value because it was new—a statement that in effect heralded the work to come as he transitioned to the tragedy envisioned in the Mairet-Chapelain essays. Corneille created a sensation with his next play, Le Cid (1637), a Spanish tale in which an indignant slap between two aging Castilian noblemen leads to the honor killing of the aggressor, which in turn imperils his daughter’s engagement to the son of the disgraced man. Sellout audiences thrilled to Corneille’s verse text as it deftly captured the hopeless efforts of the young lovers, Chime` ne and Rodrigue, to extricate themselves from the ties of filial duty, personal honor, and societal expectations in order to preserve their love. After genuine offers of self-sacrifice and Rodrigue’s sudden heroism fighting the Moors, they present their heartbreaking dilemma to their King, whose creative resolution sanctions their marrying only after a period of mourning. With this radical condensation of Guille´n de Castro’s sprawling Las Mocedades del Cid (1621), Corneille had hit on a fresh, though generically ambiguous, conception of French drama that would please the paying audience and, after some fierce debate among critics and admonishment by the Acade´mie (led by Chapelain), find acceptance. Over the next decade, Corneille produced a run of regular tragedies on fabled figures of the ancient Mediterranean world—aptly, the imperial setting of artful oratory and rhetoric, as simulated in his heroic verse. He fashioned an alternative classical dramaturgy that is neither truly Greek nor Roman in the handling of plot. As he would later explain in his major statement on dramatic form and purpose, the three-part Discours sur le poe`me dramatique (1660), he redesigned tragedy’s first act ‘‘to contain the seeds of all that has to happen, as much for the main action as for the episode.’’ Rather than require the spectators to keep in mind the necessary details of the cursed fates of noble families, as traditionally recounted in an extended opening monologue or tedious expository scene, he plunges them straightaway into a world of apprehension, newly troubled by a dream, an oracle, or a recent shift in the political landscape. The complications and tragic errors that trap the characters in a distressing ethical dilemma do not originate in the back story but arise before the eyes of the audience, who are thereafter keen to attend the agonizing process by which the characters make choices and face their particular outcomes. This immediacy of incident, rendered clear, swift, and logical, is the product of Corneille’s rational approach to creating a unity of action. In the event, it keeps both audience and action fully present in the theatrical experience, and allows spectators to account for the story’s beginning, middle, and end.

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Western Drama through the Ages We find a similar rational economy at work in his reconception of tragic character, beginning with a general axiom: as the story requires that the individual be subordinate to the state, so the dramaturgy makes character subordinate to tragic situation. Corneille reassigns the choric function to confidants (in the synecdochical form of nurses, friends, freed slaves, ladies in waiting and other royal retinue), and he purifies the heroic leads in thought and feeling so that they may act in certitude of noble beliefs, even if it demands the sacrifice of their own lives for a righteous cause. Corneille’s men and women possess uncommon souls, open hearts, and conspicuous moral codes. They utter relentlessly elevated sentiments even in the most emotional circumstances. Words signifying abstract qualities of the imagined national character, such as duty (devoir), honor (honneur), reputation (gloire), and virtue (vertu), resonate forcefully as they circulate within the play texts; as a result, the characters approach allegory in their embodiment of particular ideals of family and state. Thus, the title character in Horace (1640), chosen by Rome to fight to the death the three brothers of his Alban wife, only to slay afterward his sister Camille (the fiance´ of one of the dead) for her curses on Rome, nevertheless receives the Roman emperor’s pardon in recognition of his true and natural self: ‘‘Your virtue places your glory above your crime.’’ The actions of the Cornelian tragic hero have the transformative power to edify those who bear witness to them. In Polyeucte (1642), the Roman governor, his daughter Pauline, and the war hero who loves her ultimately renounce their pagan beliefs for Christianity after seeing the unbending resolve of her converted husband Polyeucte, whose willing martyrdom signals a decisive show of God’s grace. Cinna (1640) depicts crises of conscience and betrayal that occur among conspirators to assassinate Emperor Augustus. These disaffected but fundamentally decent people experience a change of heart that stays their plans, but the greater triumph is Augustus’s magnanimous response to their confession, as urged by Empress Livia: ‘‘clemency is the most beautiful mark / By which the world may know a true monarch.’’ All five Corneille plays previously cited evidence a signature plotting device: the crystallization of the story into a configuration of two (or three) imperiled characters standing before a power figure who tests or judges them. Whether the figure unperturbedly resolves the crisis (L’Illusion, Le Cid, Horace) or undergoes a painful enlightenment of his own (Cinna, Polyeucte), his theatrical function is to teach Corneille’s audience (and his monarch) how best to rule. Almost every one of Corneille’s plays, therefore, ends in optimism, as either a lessening of sorrow or a prospect of hope. Corneille vigorously explicated and defended his plays in the seven editions of his work published in his lifetime, either in short supplementary texts titled ‘‘Dedicatory Epistle,’’ ‘‘Forward,’’ ‘‘To the Reader,’’ and ‘‘Examination,’’ or in the longer Discours, in which he responded to the state of contemporary criticism. The most prominent of these critics was Cardinal Richelieu’s prote´ge´, Franc¸ois He´delin, the

French Neoclassical Drama Abbe´ d’Aubignac, whose influential study of theater practice, La Pratique du the´aˆtre (1657), stood as the most extensive discussion of ancient drama to date and served as a handbook on the writing of new regular plays based on the inviolable principles of propriety and verisimilitude. Corneille presented a working dramatist’s rebuttal to the official dramaturgy by questioning the unreasonable interpretations of verisimilitude, moral utility, pity and terror, and the three unities. His essays, as Marvin Carlson puts it, constitute ‘‘the century’s most fully developed statement of disagreement with the prevailing assumptions of French neoclassic theatrical theory.’’ He never overcame the ambivalence in his methods; the author of the solemn, neoclassical Horace could not forsake the creator of the delightfully irregular L’Illusion comique. Despite his claims to applied classicism, Corneille remained in the camp of Franc¸ ois Ogier, Andre´ Mareschal, and Georges de Scude´ry, who favored a more flexible poetics. Discouraged by the failure of his 1651 tragedy Pertharite, Corneille returned to Rouen for an eight-year hiatus, during which he prepared a new edition of his plays and worked out his three Discours. His attempt to reconquer the Paris theater started strong with Oedipe (1659) and the dazzling machine play La Toison d’or (1660), but abated until his definitive retirement in 1674. It is possible to view this respectable—but losing—fifteen-year battle as his slow capitulation to an entrenched classicism he could never fully indulge, for within five years a newcomer on the scene would fascinate the devotees of tragedy with an unmatched ability to conform his dramatic composition to the neoclassical ideal.

Jean Racine Born more than a generation after Corneille, Jean Racine (1639–99) received a rigorous education in philosophy, rhetoric, and classical languages, and assimilated the principles of regularity from an early age. He knew the major classicist commentary by the formidable critics Heinsius and d’Aubignac, and even owned the 1573 edition of Pietro Vettori’s 1560 Latin translation of Aristotle’s Poetics (Racine’s margin notes are among the first extant French translations of key passages of the Poetics.) Unable to obtain a position in the church, Racine concentrated on tribute poetry to the King, which brought him monetary awards and admission to the court in 1663. He turned his talents to tragedy, but his first produced plays, La The´baı¨de (1664) and Alexandre le Grand (1665), met with only limited success. It is surprising that Racine turned to playwriting at all, given the anti-theater stance of his pious educators at the Convent of Port-Royal, the Catholic collective that followed the austere doctrine of Jansenism. But Racine, reared by relatives after being orphaned at age three, asserted throughout his life an independence from even the most influential institutions and mentors—from all, that is, but one: Louis XIV.

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Western Drama through the Ages His theater career took off with his third tragedy, Andromaque (1667), the first of eight works for the tragedians at the Hoˆtel de Bourgogne. The story emerges from the physical and emotional desolation of the Trojan War. Pyrrhus, king of Epirus in northwestern Greece, has returned from the ruins of Troy with dead Hector’s wife Andromaque and infant son Astyanax as prisoners. When the Greek envoy Orestes arrives to demand the death of Hector’s child, Pyrrhus, who desires Andromaque, uses the threat to force her to reciprocate affection for him. Unable to dishonor her husband’s memory in that way, she agrees to marry Pyrrhus only to save her child, with the secret aim of killing herself afterward. Egged on by Hermione, Pyrrhus’s spurned fiance´e, Orestes and his men slay Pyrrhus at the wedding, just moments after his crowning Andromaque, and the shock of Orestes’ subsequent report of it drives Hermione to suicide and Orestes mad. Each living character in the deadlock chain of frustrated love (Orestes-Hermione-PyrrhusAndromaque-dead Hector) is torn between sexual desire and a sense of commitment, be it honor, pride or duty, and in the end only the devoted Andromaque, now Queen, survives, as her morally compromised captors crumble around her. This first great play of Racine’s offers a new conception of tragedy for a new age. Unlike Corneille’s heroic characters, who find the wherewithal to take action according to their convictions, Racine’s wage war with themselves too long to arrive at satisfactory solutions, and break free only in irrational and fatal acts of self-preservation. Love, in its recognizable manifestations of passion, desire, jealousy, cruelty, and self-sacrifice, now becomes an authentic cause—or, at least, agency—for tragedy. Corneille saw this as a wrongheaded approach to classical composition and, more personally, as an encroachment on his dramatic territory. Here, and in subsequent plays, he objected to Racine’s brazen rewriting of the known historical and mythological facts of the ancient story material and to the anachronisms that riddled the dialogue. But many in the audience, including the King, found in Racine’s exploration of the human heart greater psychological realism than they had known before in the theater. Thus, the five acts divide the story into psychological stages rather than action segments, as in Corneille. In what must have resonated publicly as a symbolic contest of gifted tragic poets—perhaps even redolent of Aristophaneste pitting of Aeschylus and Euripides in the underworld poetry contest in The Frogs—both men premiered a version of the love story of Titus and Berenice, a week apart, in November 1670; thirtyyear-old Racine’s Be´re´nice was judged superior to sixty-four-year-old Corneille’s Tite et Be´re´nice. In a valiant last effort to prove his flexibility and vitality as a artist, Corneille gave the public a Racinian love tragedy of his own, Sure´na (1674). When it failed to attract notice, Corneille left the theater for good. The decade of plays that followed expanded on the tragic universe Racine had begun to chart in Andromaque. He took up political intrigue in his next tragedy, Britannicus (1669), which depicts the young emperor Nero’s murderous first steps

French Neoclassical Drama toward despotism. Having fallen in love with Junia, the young woman promised to his step-brother Britannicus, Nero breaks with the counsel of his controlling mother Agrippina and his tutor Burrhus, and he poisons Britannicus, whom he also suspects of vying for the throne. But when the distraught Junia takes refuge in the Temple of Vesta, Nero’s compounded losses lead him to early madness. This vision of ancient Rome as a practice yard for deceit and treachery, where spies and assassins lurk, and innocence is toyed with or snuffed out, is far darker than that of the conscience-stricken conspirators in Corneille’s Cinna. Racine’s characters creep cautiously through an atmosphere of paranoia, and must weigh the validity of a string of false reports, hushed warnings, and feigned testimonials. The centerpiece of Britannicus (2.3-8), for instance, is a suspenseful eavesdropping episode of unnatural silences and disjointed dialogue, in which Nero watches and listens from the shadows as Junia, on his command, discourages Britannicus by denying her feelings for him. Once again (and later in Iphige´nie en Aulide), Racine orchestrates the climax around a killing at a sacred site (altar, temple) to signify the sacrifice that ancient tragedy required. As in all his plays, no kingly adjudicator steps forward to resolve matters that threaten stability; rather, the ruling figure either shares in tragic suffering or exacts punishment on the sinners in absentia: e.g., in the bloody Turkish seraglio tragedy, Bajazet (1672), the sultan Amurat never appears on stage, yet puts an end to the scandal at home by sending his wife’s and brother’s death warrants from abroad, in the invisible, impersonal manner of fate. Racine’s title characters, when not the central tragic figures (Be´re´nice, Mithridate, Phe`dre), are the very objects of desire or hatred that unwittingly incite the emotional disorder of the plots (Andromaque, Britannicus, Bajazet). Racinian tragic heroes become enslaved by their passions, experience shame, and consult confidants, who may only make things worse. Hesitant and indecisive, they conceal their feelings, which, if made public, would bring punishment down upon them; failing to avoid the ones they fear, they spin lies. When they finally confess openly to those they love but cannot have, their rejection incites them to behave abominably toward them. Increasingly aware of the world closing in and the clock running down on their lives, they take desperate, frenzied action that only backfires and ends in death. Phe`dre (1677) is the finest example of this tragic paradigm. Racine preserves the essential schema of Euripides’s Hippolytus, while softening the contours of the main characters so as to make them pitiable to a modern audience. The play’s careful presentation of the oscillations in Phe` dre’s agonizing struggle to manage her illicit love for her step-son, Hippolytus, adroitly renders the tragic character’s futile effort to extricate herself from a destiny in which she is utterly complicit. Much of the strangeness of Racine’s theater is due to its unique dramatic purpose of self-analysis. His characters dissect and explicate their motives,

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Western Drama through the Ages predicaments, and ill-fated ends without cease, and rarely if ever do they learn the plays’ implicit lessons of wisdom. Their discourse is clean, intelligible, and concentrated, using a vocabulary of only a few thousand words. Where Corneille’s texts ring with grandiloquence and glamorize abstract concepts, Racine’s produce a flow of recurring words and images that interconnect the characters and simulate the sweep of mounting doom. Words that signify ordinary, often concrete objects acquire symbolic value, often sexual: e.g., ‘‘eye,’’ ‘‘monster,’’ ‘‘design,’’ ‘‘veil,’’ ‘‘voyage,’’ fires,’’ ‘‘flame.’’ What’s more, the texts are virtually free of stage directions. Requisite stage design asks only for an all-purpose palace setting, usually a room of common access, in which characters confess their paralyzing crises between entrances and exits. These characteristics and conditions dovetail easily with the unities of action, time, and place that Racine worked to respect. It is his interpretation of verisimilitude, however, that best accounts for his ability to achieve the plays’ remarkable compression and intensity. In the Prefaces to his plays, he describes verisimilitude as the essential picture of a story that the public has come to believe, rather than the strict historical record of events. This gives the playwright greater license to shape the story to dramaturgical parameters while preserving its credibility with the audience. His Be´ re´ nice (1670) benefited from such thinking, inasmuch as it departed from standard tragic design to realize extreme classical simplicity: the plot simply marks the end to the fabled love affair between Titus, the new Emperor of Rome, and Be´re´nice, Queen of Judeah, due to insurmountable political pressure (Rome will not allow Titus to marry a foreigner). Although it does not climax in a death, it lays claim to tragedy for its heroic characters, its ability to excite an audience’s passions, and for its ‘‘majestic sadness,’’ which alone gives us tragic pleasure. Racine concludes, ‘‘The principal rule is to please and to move: all the others are made only to achieve this first one.’’

Molie`re The third career of prominence, that of the most versatile theater practitioner of the age, occurred between—but not wholly independent of—those of the two tragic poets: Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622–73), working under the professional name ‘‘Molie`re,’’ first won royal approval performing in a revival of Corneille’s Nicome`de in 1658 (later teaming with him for the spectacle Psyche´), and he gave Racine his first break by producing his two earliest tragedies. But as playwright, Molie`re had to stake his territory elsewhere to achieve a level of artistry comparable to these masters. While Corneille and Racine each contributed one exceptional comedy to the neoclassical age, respectively, Le Menteur (1642) and Les Plaideurs (1668), the comic genre belonged unquestionably to Molie`re. The son of a royal household valet and upholsterer, Molie`re at twenty-one abandoned

French Neoclassical Drama the law career he had trained for to form a troupe called L’Illustre-The´aˆtre, with aspirations to distinguish themselves as interpreters of French tragedy. They soon incurred financial problems, for which Molie`re served briefly in debtor’s prison. For the next twelve years they toured the French provinces until returning to Paris in 1658 as the Troupe de Monsieur, under the protection of the King’s only brother, Philippe, duc d’Orle´ans. Little is known about Molie`re’s formative touring years beyond the fact that they provided test audiences for the farces and early comedies he wrote to balance the troupe’s repertoire. Shortly upon resettling in Paris, Molie`re scored his first success with a farcical one-act in prose, Les Pre´cieuses ridiciules (1659), a broadly funny satire of the affected gentility and erudition of the social-climbing bourgeoisie. Ostensively, it targeted the laughably inadequate imitators of the aristocratic literary salons, where wealthy art lovers cultivated a courtly pre´ciosite´—i.e., an idiom of overrefined conversation and conduct inspired by the gallantry and sensitivity in heroic romance novels. Yet, a stinging criticism of the absurdities of the actual salons themselves could not have been lost on members of the audience. The significance of Les Pre´cieuses ridicules lay in Molie`re’s discovery that pretension and obsessive self-regard were viable sources of levity, as effective (and profitable) as clownish costumes and antic situation. It pointed him toward a comedy of character, whose business it is, he wrote, ‘‘to present generally all the defects of men, principally of the men of our century.’’ Such satiric purpose inevitably brought him a host of troubles with jealous rivals, offended courtiers, and factions in the religious community. While we cannot reduce Molie`re’s compositional approach to a fixed template, we may identify several major tendencies in his work that drew on his familiarity with classic Roman comedy. He updated the ancient figures of the irritable father (senex) and the wily slave (servus) to the modern types of the neurotic bourgeois parent (Sganarelle) and his clever, mischievous servant (Mascarille or Scapin)—roles that Molie`re himself enjoyed taking. It is the comedic function of the latter to contrive ruses that will either accomplish or thwart the wishes of the former, usually in matters of matrimony, as seen in L’E´tourdi (1655), Les Pre´ cieuses ridicules (1659), L’Amour me´ decin (1665), Le Me´decin malgre´ lui (1666), and Les Fourberies de Scapin (1671). Where Roman plots turned on a father’s efforts to marry off his son to best advantage, Molie`re’s capitalized on the modern bourgeois difficulty of marrying off a daughter safely and profitably: e.g., Le De´pit amoureux (1656), L’E´cole des maris (1661), L’E´ cole des femmes (1662), La Princesse d’E´lide (1664), Le Me´ decin malgre´ lui (1666), Le Sicilien (1667), L’Avare (1668), Monsieur de Pourceaungac (1669), Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), and Le Malade imaginaire (1673). A few of his plays, however, scarcely rise above the dirty tricks, misunderstandings, and ‘‘comedies of error’’ of Plautus, including Sganarelle (1660), Dom Garcie de Navarre (1661), and Monsieur de Pourceaungac (1669).

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Western Drama through the Ages Molie`re’s most mature works, however, give full focus to the destructive effects of human faults and vices, and provide, moreover, sharp, sometimes dark, psychological insights. Each play becomes a study of a small pathology, which the title often announces: Le Tartuffe (1664, rewritten 1667) is a dual portrait of a dissembler of piety and his gullible disciple; Le Misanthrope (1666), an expose´ of a people-hating egotist who, in pursuit of love with an arch coquette, comes up empty-handed; L’Avare (1668), the very picture of miserliness and its capacity to compromise a family’s emotional and moral health; Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), a tableau of foolish middle-class ambition spurred by delusions of social quality; Les Femmes savantes (1672), a depiction of how a mania for pedantic intellectual pursuits blinds one to material truths; and Le Malade imaginaire (1673), a testament to the power of hypochondria to incapacitate one’s reason. Common to all his plays is an eccentric character of stubborn self-interest, who, being duped by opportunists or by his own illusions, throws a household into chaos until a trickster or an agent of chance restores order. Interestingly, the ever-present issue of matrimony, when interpreted as the fruits of young lovers’ courtship, is a desirable, enviable prospect, while the road-tested marriage glimpsed in mid-course is less a pairing off than a squaring-off of contentious, dissatisfied husbands and wives. In addition to his prose and verse comedies, Molie`re devised hybrid court entertainments with a view to satisfying the King’s interest in music and dancing. These were variously categorized as come´die galante, come´die pastorale he´roı¨que, or trage´die-ballet, and could feature machine play special effects. His most popular creation was the come´die-ballet, a five-act comedy with a lengthy interlude of music, singing, and ballet after each act. These include Les Faˆ cheux (1661), L’Amour me´decin (1665), Monsieur de Pourceaungac (1669), Les Amants magnifiques (1670), Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (1670), and Le Malade imaginaire (1673). (Revivals have customarily excised the interludes without doing any architectural harm to the comedy within.) Molie` re capitalized on his relationship with Louis XIV, who bestowed on him play commissions, performance permissions, royal protection (he renamed the troupe ‘‘The King’s Company’’ in 1665), actor pensions, cash, his time and society, and, best of all, his own theater, the PalaisRoyal, where the troupe could debut new plays or transfer their well-received court productions. Molie`re also premiered plays at royal residences and retreats (the Louvre, Versailles, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Chambord). The marvelous simplicity of Molie` re’s work, despite its capacity for added spectacle, is that normally it requires no more than a table and chair to stage. The language is expansive, borrowed from the different spheres in which Molie`re moved (court, urban streets, provinces). It makes comic points through basic patterns of repetition: a character reveals a one-track mind by repeatedly asking or responding in the same way to an interlocutor; another is unable to do other

French Neoclassical Drama than what he is originally told, regardless of changes in context. That bits of knockabout farce continued to appear in his comedies indicates an inherent resistance to a comedy of speech alone, and is, moreover, symptomatic of his qualified allegiance to classicism. His five-act verse texts betray a tempered regard for the Academic rules; his prefaces, even less. Molie` re preferred to dramatize the debates over his work in protective comedies of their own. In La Critique de l’E´cole des femmes (1663), Molie`re’s polemical afterplay to retaliate against hostile criticisms to his latest hit, L’E´cole des femmes, Lycidas, a petty adherent to classicism, claims that the play, in which he finds one hundred defects, ‘‘sins against all the rules of art,’’ as anyone familiar with Aristotle and Horace could tell. When he begins to count out the ancient terms for the quantitative parts of a play, the sensible Dorante (Molie`re’s spokesman) wittily asks him to ‘‘humanize’’ his speech with more accessible French expressions in place of pretentious Greek. Holding to the belief that the greatest rule of poetry is to please, he asks plainly ‘‘whether a play that has reached its goal hasn’t followed the right path.’’ On a more practical level, Uranie, a young lady unversed in classicist issues, amusingly observes that ‘‘those who talk about the rules the most and who know them better than others do, write comedies that no one finds attractive.’’ Apart from his published defenses of Le Tartuffe, which protest a bit too stridently that ‘‘the function of comedy is to correct men’s vices,’’ Molie`re spends no more time arguing the merits of classicism. The three careers discussed above attest to the peculiarly combative art world of mid-seventeenth-century Paris, where to succeed in the theater was to gain bitter enemies. Whether acting on behalf of institutions, private groups, or exercising self-promotion, critics asserted their ‘‘authoritative’’ assessments of new plays to keep themselves equal if not superior to the artist. Thus, close on the heels of Corneille’s runaway hit Le Cid came a series of pamphlet attacks on the play’s unsuitable subject, improbable plot, and structural irregularity. Corneille and his supporters entered into a public squabble (querelle) with his accusers—among them, Georges de Scude´ry, who turned to the newly founded Acade´mie to appraise the work. After a six-month examination, the Acade´mie issued a lengthy opinion, which judged Le Cid to be in violation of the rules of verisimilitude and held Corneille accountable for the morally irresponsible resolution of the permitted marriage. (Corneille would argue a defense of the play throughout his long life.) Thereafter, dramatists understood that to write a play was to engage politically with the state position on dramatic art. After the scuffle over L’E´cole des femmes in 1663, Molie`re had to appeal for royal intervention against a religious group known as les de´ vots, who labeled his Tartuffe (1664) an offense to piety and a smear on the clergy’s moral work of guiding the laity. Some sought to have Molie`re burned at the stake and, more damaging, ban public performances. Time was on Molie` re’s side, for when a

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Western Drama through the Ages retooled version of the play finally reached the Palais-Royal public in February 1669, its premiere set a box-office record for the troupe. Finally, Racine endured an especially malicious act of sabotage on New Year’s Day, 1677, when the Duchess of Bouillon, a financier of the cabal against him, bought up the Bourgogne’s first-row boxes for the first six performances of Phe`dre. While these boxes sat empty, fashionable first-nighters attended the opening of Jacques Pradon’s Phe`dre et Hippolyte at the The´aˆtre de la Rue Gue´ne´gaud on the Left Bank. As a result, Pradon’s negligible version of the Greek myth temporarily triumphed over Racine’s masterpiece. Historians have speculated that this ordeal prompted Racine to renounce the theater and accept the uncontroversial appointment of royal historiographer and Reader to the King. Only on the request of the King’s consort, Mme de Maintenon, twelve years later, did he compose his final two tragedies for private school productions. Clearly, dramatists of the highest skill and sublimity of expression needed a tough skin to withstand the petty dismissals and destructive assaults on their professional reputations.

NEOCLASSICISM: ENFORCEMENT AND DECLINE Molie`re died an actor’s death: on February 17, 1673, while playing the hysterical hypochondriac in Le Malade imaginaire at the Palais-Royal, he collapsed in a stage chair and was taken home to bed where he expired two hours later. His sudden demise initiated a restructuring of the professional French theater. The King ordered Molie`re’s company to vacate the Palais-Royal, merge with the players of the The´aˆtre du Marais, and move operations to the The´aˆtre de la Rue Gue´ ne´ gaud. There the combined troupes would specialize in comedy and machine plays while the Hoˆ tel de Bourgogne continued as leaders of tragedy. On August 18, 1680, the King completed the last phase of consolidation by ordering the Bourgogne troupe to merge with the Gue´ne´gaud company, and awarding sole rights to all French theater performances to their new entity, the The´aˆtreFranc¸ais (alternately, the Come´die-Franc¸aise) to distinguish it from the foreignlanguage performances at the The´ aˆ tre-Italien, now occupying Paris’ original purpose-built theater, the Bourgogne. Paranoia narrowed the field further: In May, 1697, on the suspicion that the Italian commedia players were preparing a play entitled The False Prude, featuring a character meant to be taken as Mme de Maintenon, the King promptly exiled the Italians from France. When they returned by invitation in 1716, a year after Louis’s death, they gradually assimilated to French-language plays, and evolved into the Ope´ra Comique. The King’s decree to centralize French theater in 1680, in what was perhaps the ultimate neoclassical gesture, stated its purpose thus: ‘‘to render play performances more perfect.’’ To ensure that plays did not offend on social, political, or decency grounds, the King appointed Paris Police Chief D’Argenson in 1701 as

French Neoclassical Drama the first theater censor; as the official examiner of plays, he (and his successors) determined which new plays could be staged and subsequently published. But the elimination of competition and the imposition of quality control gradually engendered an insular, self-regarding, and self-satisfied state theater. Despite new works by Jean-Galbert Campistron, Hilaire-Bernard Longepierre, JeanFranc¸ois Regnard, Florent Dancourt, Franc¸ois Lagrange-Chancel, Prosper Jolyot Cre´billon, Bernard-Joseph Saurin, and especially, Voltaire, it struggled to keep the neoclassical genres of comedy and tragedy vital and attractive. Emerging modern forms less concerned with classicism, such as the commedia-influenced prose comedies of Pierre de Marivaux, the tearful comedies of Pierre-Claude Nivelle de la Chausse´e, and the bourgeois drama of Denis Diderot and MichelJean Sedaine, gained increased audience approval.

The Come´die-Franc¸aise The restless public, furthermore, rediscovered an exuberant alternative to the neoclassical repertory in an ancient site—the Paris fairgrounds. The Come´dieFranc¸aise soon took legal action to protect its monopoly on French performances. The booth theaters at the fairs, in which actors found ingenious ways to fabricate short plays through monologues, were regularly razed (and rebuilt). Many of their playlets and parades mocked the ‘‘Roman’’ repertoire of the state theaters, leaving officials no choice but to prohibit all French utterance and allow only acrobatics. From 1718 to 1721, in fact, fairground troupes unwilling to perform in a foreign language had to perform in total silence; nevertheless, the more enterprising players managed to communicate through signboards. Classicism itself would run its course before the eighteenth century was out, despite the continued influence of its illustrious late seventeenth century champions. Two famous publications of 1674, Rene´ Rapin’s Re´ flexions sur la poe´ tique d’Aristote and Nicolas BoileauDespre´aux’s didactic poem L’Art Poe´tique, had held that the neoclassical principles of verisimilitude, propriety, and the three unities were supreme requirements for theater art. Rene´ Le Bossu’s Traite´ du poe¨me e´pique (1675), echoed these views in his digressions on tragedy and comedy, and Andre´ Dacier’s La Poe´tique d’Aristote (1692), a modern French translation of the Poetics with extensive line-by-line critical commentary, strengthened the prescriptive neo-classic guidelines for drama with fresh interpretations. Dacier had made a fervent defense of the Ancients in the long-running academic debate known as the ‘‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns.’’ But increasingly, the defenders of classicism could not afford to ignore the rising support for the moderns among, primarily, Jean Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, the brothers Charles, Claude and Pierre Perrault, Antoine Houdar de la Motte, Saint-Evremond, Pierre Bayle, and Marivaux. The Ancients were becoming history.

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Western Drama through the Ages Ultimately, it was the working playwrights, responding to their audience’s shifting tastes, who left classicism behind. Within the plays themselves, characters had been ridiculing the mania for classicism as early as Georges de Scude´ry’s La Come´die des come´diens (1632). By the era of Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, the author of Le Barbier de Se´ville and Le Mariage de Figaro, the theater was leading a withering assault on neo-classicism: In the preface to his first play, the bourgeois drama Euge´nie (1767), Beaumarchais became the first playwright to use the term classicist in a derogatory sense. The exclusivity and privilege of the official theater lasted only as long as the monarchy that guarded it. The Freedom of the Theaters Act of 1791 abolished theater censorship and revoked the monopoly of the Come´die-Franc¸aise; henceforth, as long as one paid copyrights to authors and agreed to municipal supervision, anyone could run a theater. After the century-long rush to establish a rarefied dramatic art patterned solidly on an ancient one, the simultaneous advent of revolution and romanticism forced French theater to invent egalitarian forms of drama for a citizenry that could never do without its theater.

FURTHER READING Corneille, Pierre. The Illusion. Adapted by Tony Kushner. New York: Broadway Play Publishing, 2003. ———. Three Masterpieces: The Liar, The Illusion, Le Cid. London: Oberon Books, 2000. Howarth, William D. French Theatre in the Neo-Classical Era, 1550–1789. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Muratore, Mary Jo. Mimesis and Metatextuality in the French Neo-Classical Text. Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1994. Racine, Jean. Racine’s Phaedra. Loughcrew, Old Castle, County Meath, Ireland: Gallery Press, 1996.


Modern Drama Kimball King

Modern Drama, beginning in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the present day is, perhaps, the fourth greatest era of dramatic achievement in Western Theater. By the late nineteenth century the Industrial Revolution and other economic changes insured that prosperous, educated middle-class people would comprise the majority of theater-goers. Therefore, it is not surprising that Scandinavian countries, marginally more democratic yet more prosperous than many nations, should dominate the theater world.

THE BEGINNINGS OF MODERN DRAMA Although the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen was born in 1828 and devoted most of his life to acting, directing and writing plays, his early works, like Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867), were verse dramas, difficult to perform. His first play with worldwide recognition was A Doll’s House (1879) in which a frustrated banker’s wife, Nora Helmer, finds that she must leave her husband and children to fulfill a sense of personal independence and integrity. Within nine years Ibsen had completed the last of his plays that featured prose stories of upper-middle class, professional Scandinavian life. Hedda Gabler was his final play in this series. Following the lead of Parisian dramatists Eugene Scribe and Victorien Sardou, Ibsen took a ‘‘well-made’’ plot (one which observed the traditional unities of time, place and action) and urgent social issues (sexism, patriarchy, ‘‘classism,’’ venereal diseases among all the classes) and combined them in serious plays, which nevertheless contained interesting characters, plot twists and biting social commentary. Later an elderly Ibsen would go on to write avant-garde symbolic plays, such as When Dead We Awaken (1900); but he is identified in the imagination of most people

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Western Drama through the Ages with his social problem plays written during his fifties. Hedda Gabler is a fine example of the genre, a fitting finale to his catalogue of dramatizations of Scandinavian life. In the play a twenty-nine-year-old Hedda enters a loveless marriage with a timid professor, George Tesman, for fear of being considered ‘‘an old maid’’ if she does not. Evidently her ‘‘heart’’ still belongs to Gilbert Lovborg, a supposedly ‘‘recovering’’ alcoholic who has written a dazzling academic treatise about the future of Western Civilization. Tesman and Lovborg compete for a university professorship, a distressing and unexpected obstacle for the plodding Tesman. Lovborg meanwhile has taken up with Thea Elvsted, a childhood nemesis of Hedda’s who appears docile, but who, in fact, has defied social mores by leaving her husband and living openly with another man. Hedda persuades (without great difficulty) Lovborg to take a drink and he ends up, predictably, losing his futuristic manuscript, supposedly inspired by Mrs. Elvsted. Hedda finds the ‘‘lost’’ manuscript but reveals to her horrified husband that she has burned it to show her love for her husband and their unborn child. Critics are divided as to whether Hedda is pregnant or not. The Swedish film director, Ingmar Bergman, offered a production of Hedda Gabler to England’s National Theatre, and Maggie Smith, as Hedda, appeared physically to be pregnant. My own feeling is that Hedda repeatedly shows she is capable of lying and that, in fact, she pretends pregnancy only to ‘‘justify’’ the burning of the manuscript. In another development, Judge Brock, a family friend, threatens to blackmail Hedda about her loaning Lovborg one of her father’s pistols so that he could kill himself. He suggests a sexual me´nage-a-trois which is unthinkable to the apparently ‘‘frigid’’ Hedda. Hedda kills herself at the play’s conclusion, the one unconventional act of her brief life. Her selfishness and ineffectiveness leads us to believe Ibsen is less certain of male/female stereotypes by the time he had reached sixty years old. Followed by the Swedish Strindberg, fifteen years his junior, Ibsen led the modern drama movement in Scandinavia and the Western world in general.

ENGLISH MODERN DRAMA Meanwhile in an England inhibited by theater prohibitions and censorship, Oscar Wilde attempted to restore vitality to the modern stage. One of his most successful plays is The Importance of Being Earnest in which he wittily skewered the mores of so-called ‘‘high society.’’ Wilde chose Half-Moon Street, a fashionable street in Mayfair, as the initial setting of his comic masterpiece. He borrowed an old classical device, a missing child who is later identified by an object. A young woman named Gwendolyn insists that she can only marry a young man named Earnest. In the conclusion of the play, the baby’s nurse, who lost the infant in her charge, successfully identifies him as being Earnest and the older brother of his closest friend. Some say that ‘‘Earnest’’ was a code name for a gay man in Wilde’s

Modern Drama day; others deny this. Still, it is patently absurd that a young woman would insist on a husband’s having a particular name. A fabulous role for an actor is provided in the person of Lady Bracknell, Gwendolyn’s mother, a woman known for her witty sayings. Most of her bon mots contain elements of a harsh political reality, such as her explaining that a better education would lead to acts of violence by the lower orders. Undoubtedly, Wilde suggests keeping the poor in ignorance is a successful means of protecting privilege for the few. Ultimately all the lovers in the play are properly joined together in what appears to be an improbable but happy ending. The combination of biting satire, which exposes the rich, and the successful fulfillment of their most selfish behaviors, oddly endeared the play not only to social critics but to would-be social arbiters. A few years later George Bernard Shaw, a self-professed Fabian (a society of British progressive liberal reformers), would use the same combination of acid wit and happy coincidence to create plays admired by both left-wing and rightwing audiences. Working with the director Harley Granville-Barker, ostensibly more radical politically than Shaw himself, Shaw produced a collection of plays at the Royal Court theater in Sloane Square. Sloane Square was in a fashionable part of town called Chelsea, very near chic Sloane Street and Harrod’s Department Store, and Chelsea was a place where well-to-do as well as, often, educated and ‘‘enlightened’’ people chose to live in London. Some in the theater world had hoped that the so-called ‘‘West End Theatres’’ around Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly would lose their popularity and that the Sloane Square of Chelsea would become a new center for art. Such was not the case, however. Shaw indeed successfully wrote plays for the Royal Court, and Granville-Barker’s plays, such as Waste (which dealt with abortion and political corruption) and the Voysey Inheritance (thievery in the respectable upper-middle classes) remained mainly unproduced during his lifetime. A play like Shaw’s famous Pygmalion, later the musical play and movie My Fair Lady, revealed Shaw’s odd mixture of charm and subversiveness. A cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle becomes the subject of a bet between two educated, upper-class gentlemen who are eager to see if she can ‘‘pass’’ for a duchess when she is presented at a society ball. Socialites were entertained by a wide range of lower-class accents and the behavioral faux pas of the flower girl/would-be duchess. They failed to notice that Shaw revealed the superficiality of the elite class system by revealing that it was directly related to accidents of pronunciation and that it supported the continued oppression of the masses. Interestingly, the same Royal Court theater, decades after the brilliant theatrical era of Shaw, became a source of major revitalization in the art world. Damaged by bombing during World War II and largely silent as a leftist platform for a whole generation, the Royal Court, founded by the Socialistic Arts Council established after World War II, opened its doors again to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger

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Western Drama through the Ages (1956), a dissection of a corrupt post–World War II Britain in which the old class system flourished, new universities designed to enlighten the masses were seen as social liabilities, and privilege and cronyism still reigned. Furthermore, the endurance, stoicism and idealism of World War II appeared to have been lost to financial and social dreams of aggrandizement. The British Empire had seemingly been dealt a death blow by the war and the old colonial empire began to dissolve, bit by bit. In 1956 the Egyptians ordered the Suez Canal to move from British to Russian management. The infusion of American money changed patterns of promotion and hopes for equality. Jimmy Porter, the protagonist of Look Back in Anger has attended a ‘‘red-brick’’ university considered socially inferior to the Establishment’s preferred universities, Oxford and Cambridge. He refused to express gratitude to a country that he believed had betrayed him. Many people believe that Look Back in Anger is primarily responsible for a twentieth century renaissance of British dramatists. For years British drama dominated Englishspeaking theater, worldwide. About twenty years after Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, David Hare wrote Plenty (1978). Plenty featured Susan Traherne as an ‘‘angry young woman’’ who mirrored Jimmy Porter’s disgust with post–World War II England. Like Jimmy, Susan was disappointed with the pervasive greed of her kinsmen, their lack of idealism, their complacency about loss of Empire. A central event in Susan’s life, as Jimmy’s had been, was the loss of the Suez Canal. Ignominiously, Britain was being forced to contain the Empire and bow increasingly to the diplomatic demands of the United States. Her favorite recollection was her heroic wartime effort, landing in France to aid the allied forces. Nothing in her later life matched that experience for patriotism and gallantry. Like Osborne before him, (interestingly, Hare delivered Osborne’s funeral elegy), and Shaw years before Osborne, all had early beginnings in the Royal Court theater and took pride in Socialist ideals. It is difficult to find a ‘‘right-wing’’ playwright of the highest caliber in England. Czech-born Tom Stoppard has been the most outspoken anti-communist, but nevertheless he could not be said to champion any conservative reactionary causes. While the English, under Shaw, took their initiative from Ibsen and Scandinavia and continue to this day to have a vital dramatic scene, other countries intruded on the scene, and momentarily, at least, captured the interest of international audiences. One thinks particularly of Russia at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of Ireland prior to World War I, and of America from the 1920s through the 1950s.

FRENCH MODERN DRAMA Next the French took center stage with absurdist theater beginning with the success of Waiting for Godot in 1952. It was probably not until the 1960s that

Modern Drama the full impact of that French movement was felt in other parts of the world. In the early 1960s, many American theater studies were almost entirely preoccupied with absurdist drama and French philosophy. The absurdists believed that life was meaningless, without purpose. Unlike the social realists in Scandinavia, Russia, Ireland, England, and America, who had transformed theater into a means of changing culture, the absurdists appeared to suggest that humankind would never improve, that neither any country nor any person could set an example worth emulation. All was in vain. In Beckett’s justly famous Waiting for Godot two tramps wait for Mr. Godot to appear. An Irishman by birth, Beckett emigrated to France where he learned to be fluent in French. His masterwork was En Attendant Godot. Interestingly, since the French word for God is ‘‘Dieu.’’ Godot is ‘‘franglais,’’ which is a mixture of French and English often spoken by tourists. ‘‘Ot’’ at the end of a man’s name generally connoted affection or a diminutive size. If Mr. Godot is not God—or if he is a diminished, even ‘‘cute’’ God—why is he important to the two tramps who await his arrival? Named Vladimir and Estragon, suggesting first a Russian, then an Hungarian nationality, they are everyman figures. The audience never discovers their nationality, educational background, social or economic milieu or sexual preferences. Unlike the early characters in Ibsen’s or Chekhov’s or Shaw’s plays, few specific character traits are elucidated and no complications of plot or personal convictions bring conflict to the play. Instead of plot there is rambling conversation and mild horseplay—swapping boots and carrots and such. Two other characters appear, Pozzo and Lucky. One is a sadist and the other his victim. It is difficult to see what they represent, except perhaps the predators and their prey that Beckett had observed during his lifetime. Although ‘‘Mr. Godot’’ never appears to Vladimir and Estragon, a third party promises he will appear tomorrow. The audience is skeptical, assuming that he probably will not appear. Vladimir and Estragon remain, waiting for him. Why? Does he promise salvation, or more modestly, a job? The two tramps resemble all of humankind waiting for someone or something to change their lives, to give it a purpose.

AMERICAN MODERN DRAMA American theater has a long, noble tradition, but outside of the United States, Eugene O’Neill was perhaps the first American playwright to gain recognition. Beginning with expressionism, O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape (1922) suggests that mankind was becoming a slave to the very industries that had brought him supposed good fortune. The successful steel business in particular was seen to have had an atavistic effect on man’s development, making him less human, more ape-like. O’Neill also experimented with short nautical plays. The SS Glencairn

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Western Drama through the Ages series was one of the first products of a creative writing class, (George Peirce Baker’s at Harvard) to become a commercial success. O’Neill also contributed to summer stock shows, particularly under Susan Glaspell’s guidance, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and to off-Broadway theater where the Provincetown, Massachusetts players performed during the winter season. Drawing on Freud and Marx for psychological and political ideas, O’Neill became famous with Beyond the Horizon (1920), Desire Under the Elms (1924), Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), The Iceman Cometh (1946), and eventually the famous Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1956), which autobiographically (after alterations) tells the inside secrets of his own dysfunctional family. O’Neill had made the world aware of America’s onstage contributions. He was followed by Lillian Hellman , Clifford Odets and his group theater, and Paul Green and the outdoor ’’symphonic’’ theater. Odets introduced natural speech to the American stage and he was followed in this style by Arthur Miller, whose Death of a Salesman (1949), among other plays, became a great statement of yearning for—and failing to achieve—the American Dream. Not far in age from Miller was Tennessee Williams, whom the great modern theater-agent Margaret Ramsey once called the most talented playwright of the twentieth century. Nearly every one of Williams’s plays was made into a successful movie, though A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) is perhaps more closely associated with his name than any other of his striking achievements—in poetry and in the novel.

RUSSIA, IRELAND, AND SCANDINAVIA Probably the two most important examples of modern drama in the twentieth century have been provided by England and the United States. However, many other nations have been well represented in the movement. If Ibsen is truly ‘‘the father of Modern Drama’’ as many have claimed, Scandinavia can say that Modern Drama had its origins in that region, particularly Norway. However, as this book has attempted to reveal, nearly every country has amassed a significant number of ‘‘modern’’ plays in their native language. One cannot forget the Russians, especially Chekhov, at the end of the nineteenth century. Surely the Irish in the years preceding World War I captured the world’s imagination with works by Synge, O’Casey, Yeats, and others.

MODERN DRAMA STYLES The pessimism of absurdism from such plays as Waiting for Godot in the 1950s is a delicious indulgence, but it could not pervade drama. The atom bomb, the holocaust, and World War II itself all suggested that humans had learned nothing from their past and were destined to destroy themselves and the whole earth

Modern Drama someday. Therefore, perhaps as a result, a ‘‘can-do’’ attitude of the plays of the 1960s and 70s brought about a new theater era. Feminist plays that indicated that women deserved freedom and respect, African American plays that suggested raw racism could be defeated, gay plays that insisted that sexual orientation was a choice, not a social or biological handicap, appeared. Realism, naturalism, expressionism, surrealism, didactism, plus ‘‘angry’’ theater, ‘‘symphonic’’ theater, ‘‘ agit prop’’ theater, ‘‘in yer face’’ theater, etc. have all played a role in making the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first century especially rich in theatrical offerings. Several successful and memorable plays of the modern era were primarily realistic. Enduring drama sometimes combined realism with another genre—naturalism, expressionism, modernism, etc. For example, Tennessee Williams’s realistic plays employ many expressionistic devices, as do Eugene O’Neill’s. Both Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter and Pulitzer Prize winner Sam Shepard wrote plays that combined realistic elements with absurdist ones. One should always remember that a play is what takes place on the stage, and that placing any play too strictly into a category (i.e., realism, absurdism, etc.) can sometimes bewilder viewers. A number of categories ‘‘blur.’’ For example, it is difficult to say where realism ends and naturalism begins. In realistic plays the protagonists may well have a greater responsibility for their destiny than in naturalistic ones. For example, the ‘‘realistic’’ All My Sons by Miller, faults Joe Keller, who sold the U.S. government faulty plane engines, whereas the more naturalistic The Hairy Ape suggests that society has robbed Yank of the ability to shape his life, that his lack of education, income, etc. have made him more vulnerable than Joe. Some critics describe Waiting for Godot as being ‘‘expressionist,’’ while others call it ‘‘surrealistic.’’ And this archetypical absurdist play, Waiting for Godot (and other Beckett works) was said by its author not to be ‘‘absurd’’ at all. Possibly Russian plays at the turn of the century placed a greater blame on social institutions than on intelligent individuals, making them more naturalistic than realistic. The emergence of Ireland with a viable theater, especially in Dublin prior to World War I, suggests that a kind of romanticism replaced naturalism. O’Neill appeared to draw on the romantic for his early works but to write more ‘‘naturalistically’’ in his final endeavors. Both Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller drew on realism and expressionism. Edward Albee may have brought European absurdism into mainstream American plays when he wrote The Zoo Story in 1958 and an essay, ‘‘Which Theatre is the Absurd One,’’ in 1960. It could be asked, ‘‘Why have any categories for drama?’’ Perhaps one needs to search for some names that evoke a common response in most people. Certain societal changes, such as the emerging importance of the role of women, the acceptance by intelligent open-minded people of gay experiences, and the universal denial of racial stereotyping make contemporary drama more inclusive than ever. What is important, perhaps, is what one ‘‘sees’’ in a dramatic piece. Whether

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Western Drama through the Ages it is revealed self-knowledge, social flaws or social injustice, what is important is the viewer’s reaction. What is also significant is that audiences have access to all these writers. Theater is one of the most social forms of art, in that one almost invariably shares it with other people, while it is possible to read a poem or novel or see a painting in solitude. Despite national origins or dramatic techniques, enduring classics of the modern period will be those that capture basic human concerns that bridge the centuries.

FURTHER READING King, Kimball. Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish, and American Playwrights. New York: Routledge, 2001. Taylor, John Russell. Anger and After: A Guide to New British Drama. London: Methuen, 1969. ———. The Second Wave: British Drama of the Sixties. London: Eyre Methuen, 1978.

PART II

Two Other Major Eras of Western Drama


Medieval Drama Edward Donald Kennedy

THE DEATH OF DRAMA Although much of the literature of the Middle Ages was indebted to classical antiquity, this was not true of medieval drama. During the early medieval period, from the fall of Rome in the late fifth century until the tenth century, drama was essentially dead. It had been killed by the pagans and Christians of late antiquity. This was due in part to the Romans’ lack of interest in drama. Western classical drama had its origins in religious ceremonies of the ancient Greeks, who began producing plays in the fifth century B.C., and it reached its height with the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and the comedies of Aristophanes. Although much of Roman civilization was based upon that of its Greek predecessors, drama never had the importance among the Romans that it had among the Greeks. There were, to be sure, a number of dramatists, the best known of whom today are Plautus (254–184 B.C.) and Terence (c. 185–159 B.C.), both of whom wrote comedies, and Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–65 A.D.), who wrote tragedies. The plays of these authors, however, were far more influential when they were rediscovered by European writers of the Renaissance than they were in ancient Rome. The tragedies of Seneca, for example, had probably never been intended to be performed but were written as closet dramas, dramas meant to be read rather than performed. The comedies of Plautus and Terence were performed during the days of the Roman Republic but their popularity waned after the establishment of the Roman Empire, and they were performed only occasionally after the reign of Augustus, who ruled at the time of the birth of Christ. In the Poetics Aristotle had defined drama as the ‘‘imitation of an action.’’ The Romans, however, often preferred types of entertainment that involved action

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Western Drama through the Ages without imitation. Their theatrical productions included music and dance, circus acts, such as juggling and acrobatics, gladiatorial combats, animal fights, and during times of persecutions, shows that included feeding Christians and other enemies of the state to lions and other wild animals. Some of the productions that did involve imitation of actions were obscene, often pornographic farces (many of which were improvised with little written dialogue) and pantomimes. Those who participated in productions that could be considered performances were generally drawn from the dregs of society, and in the Roman Republic actors, in those days known for loose morals, could not vote or hold political office and had a social rank comparable to that of slaves and prostitutes. They gained more prestige after the Empire was established, and their status appears to have risen as the Empire degenerated. They became an important part of the emperors’ method of holding on to power through giving the people bread and circuses, keeping them fed and entertained. It was a way of drawing attention away from the more serious problems of life (similar to the technique shown in the modern musical Cabaret, set in Berlin in 1929–30). Not surprisingly, early Christians had little use for or appreciation of most of the entertainments that amused the pagans, in part because of the immorality, in part because of the brutality. In 198 A.D. an early Christian writer Tertulian wrote an essay De spectaculis in which he admonished Christians to stay away from the circuses and theaters. If they wanted entertainment, he said, they could find it through the music and rituals offered by the church. Religion was to be a substitute for secular entertainment. However, even after the empire became Christian in the fourth century, the theaters remained open; and although clergy were forbidden to attend entertainments, laymen could not attend on Sundays and religious holidays, and no Christian could become an actor, the government continued to finance performances. State-sponsored entertainments continued even after the empire was conquered by Germanic tribes in 476, and there are records of productions as late as the sixth century. They became less frequent, however, not only because of Christian disapproval of them but also because of the poverty of the late empire and the need to use government funds for other purposes. Theatrical productions gradually died out. There continued to be, throughout Europe, secular entertainments of various sorts: wandering minstrels told and sang stories; people performed pantomimes that acted out folk rituals, such as wooing ceremonies and stories from the pagan past in which a hero is killed but is then reborn and those that portray the death of the old year and the birth of the new. The habit of reading drama written in Latin also continued; the plays of Terence and to a lesser extent Plautus were read, and there is some evidence that at times the plays were read aloud by a reader and actors pantomimed the action. Manuscripts of classical Latin plays continued to be copied, and it has been suggested that Chaucer developed the idea for the

Medieval Drama five-book structure of his tragic story Troilus and Criseyde by having read the five-act comedies of Plautus. Some plays, apparently intended as closet dramas, were written in the tenth century by Hrothsvita of Gandersheim, the canoness of a Benedictine monastery in Saxony in the eastern part of what is now Germany. Apparently shocked by having read Latin plays of Terence, she wrote several plays, modeled upon Terence, but concerned with the lives of the saints and martyrs. So far as we know, the plays were never acted but were intended to be read at her monastery. Although they foreshadow later vernacular plays about saints, they seem to have had no influence on other writers and were apparently unknown outside of her small circle of readers. For years drama that was performed by actors who impersonated characters was dead.

THE REBIRTH OF DRAMA Drama was reintroduced into western Europe in the tenth century as a part of the liturgy for the Easter Mass. Just as drama among the ancient Greeks was a part of their religious observances, among Christians it too was reborn as a part of the most joyous and triumphant day of their liturgical year. The Christian Mass had always included elements that were potentially dramatic. The Mass itself is seen as a bloodless reenactment of the passion of Christ. (‘‘This is my body broken for you.’’ ‘‘This is my blood.’’) Festival days in the church had ceremonies with symbols, such as a cre`che at Christmas, a star at Epiphany, and palms on Palm Sunday. On Good Friday there was a ceremony known as the deposition of the cross in which the cross was removed from the front of the church and placed in a ‘‘tomb’’ or container of some sort in the church. On Easter Sunday the cross was replaced at the front of the church, symbolizing the resurrection. Much of the singing, divided between a priest and a choir or between the two parts of the choir in what is known as antiphonal singing, was similar in form to dialogue in drama, except that the crucial element of drama, impersonation, was missing. For centuries churches throughout Europe had added embellishments known as tropes to their traditional liturgies. For example, the traditional liturgy for the end of the Mass was ‘‘Ite, missa est’’ (‘‘Go, it is dismissed’’). Some churches extended this by ending the Mass with ‘‘Ite nunc in pace, spiritus sanctus super vos sit, iam missa est’’ (‘‘Go now in peace, may the holy spirit be with you, now it is dismissed’’). The additional words constitute a trope. In the tenth century a new trope involving impersonation was added to the Easter Mass. Known by its opening Latin words ‘‘Quem Quaeritis?’’ (‘‘Whom do you seek?), this trope concerns the three Marys who visit Christ’s tomb on Easter

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Western Drama through the Ages morning and find the stone rolled away and an angel there. Members of the clergy impersonated the angel and the three Marys. The simplest (although apparently not the earliest) of these is from the Benedictine Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland. It consists of the following three lines: Angel:

Quem quaeritis in sepulchro, Christocolae?

The Marys: Angel: (Angel:

Jesum Nazarenum crucifixum, O caelicolae.

Non est hic, surrexit sicut praedixerat; ite, nuntiate quia surrexit de sepulchro. Whom do you seek in the tomb, Christians?

The Marys:

Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, O heavenly one.

Angel: He is not here, he has arisen as he had foretold; go, announce that he has arisen from the tomb.)

This was the beginning of drama in post-classical western Europe. Other versions of this trope are more elaborate with added lines of dialogue. Some have additional scenes in which the Marys buy spices from a merchant or in which they go to tell the news to Peter and John or in which Christ appears to the apostles. Different scenes were indicated by different platforms grouped around a playing area in the nave of the church. By the eleventh century other dramatic tropes were written for other important days in the liturgical year. Not surprisingly, one for the Christmas Mass was modeled upon the quem quaeritis Easter trope but concerned the shepherds who seek the Christ child: ‘‘Quem quaeritis in praesepe, pastores, cicite?’’ (‘‘Whom do you seek in the manger, shepherds, say?’’). There is one for Epiphany, which celebrates the visit of the wise men, and one, with a wrathful Herod, depicting the slaughter of the innocents for the feast of the Holy Innocents. Liturgical plays remained a part of the Roman Catholic church’s liturgy throughout the medieval period and, in some countries, much later. Some of the later Latin plays were elaborate and, taking well over an hour to perform, would have dominated any church service of which they were a part and thus appear to have been produced separately from the Mass. Since the parts were sung they very much resembled operatic productions. These include the Play of Daniel from Beauvais, north of Paris, which was intended for the Christmas season. (Daniel was seen as one of the Old Testament prophets who foresaw the coming of Christ.) Another was The Play of Herod, which originated in Fleury and was intended for the festival of the Holy Innocents. These included elaborate staging and costuming, with, for example, actors dressed up as lions for the Daniel play.1 At the Benedikbeuren abbey in Germany a series of plays for Advent and Christmas were written in the twelfth century, and these must have included some

Medieval Drama spectacular effects since Herod, after slaughtering the innocents, is, according to the stage directions, gnawed to pieces by worms. A Benedikbeuren Passion play, though primarily written in Latin, has some dialogue in German, which indicates that drama was moving from strictly Latin to languages that the audience could understand.

VERNACULAR DRAMA While Latin plays continued, throughout the Middle Ages, to be performed in churches as part of the liturgy or as special productions in the church, in the twelfth century vernacular drama began to develop for production outside the church. The subjects of most of the vernacular plays was religious, and the authors would have been clerics, but the plays, written for production outside the church, were not restricted to topics that were suited to the liturgy but could be used to teach essential biblical stories in languages that people could understand. A good example of early vernacular drama is the twelfth-century Myste` re d’Adam (Play of Adam), which was written in Anglo-Norman, the dialect of French spoken in England after the Norman Conquest. Written to be performed on the outer steps of a church and possibly performed during Advent, it covers the Creation story through Cain’s murder of Abel and then concludes with a procession of Old Testament prophets. The manuscript is incomplete, and the Myste`re d’Adam was possibly part of a much longer play and may have included stories from the New Testament as well. The story of the Fall was essential to the instruction of medieval Christians since it explains the necessity of the incarnation of Christ: Adam corresponds to Christ, the new Adam who did not sin. The play treats the biblical story of the Fall with considerable freedom, having the devil tempt Adam first and then, when he fails, turn to Eve, whom he wins over through the type of flattery found in twelfth-century courtly lyric poetry. Adam, before the Fall, is described as serious and peaceful, but Eve, even then, not sufficiently humble. The play is enlivened by the appearance of devils who mingle with the audience and threaten them, and to show that everyone before the new Adam was damned, they lead the murdered Abel away to Hell, although more gently than they do his wicked brother Cain. A few other vernacular plays from this period also survive: the Anglo-Norman La Seinte resurreccion concerning the resurrection of Christ but with many variations on the biblical account, such as dialogue between Pilate and Joseph of Arimathea and the miraculous curing of the soldier Longinus’s blindness by the blood and water that flow from Christ’s wounds. Another example is a Spanish play, the Auto de los Reyes Magos (Coming of the Magi), a vernacular account of the wise men’s visit to the Christ child that suggests some skepticism on the part of the wise men.

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The Vernacular Plays of the Later Middle Ages Not much drama has survived between the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries and the fourteenth century. There is, however, a great deal of dramatic material, most of it religious, from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and scholars generally divide these plays into the following categories: 1. The mystery plays presented the most significant events of biblical tradition from the fall of Satan to Judgment Day. These were essentially history plays intended to teach world history that was important to one’s salvation. 2. The morality plays, which were produced in England in the fifteenth century, are allegorical plays and include characters with names like ‘‘Mankind,’’ ‘‘Death,’’ and ‘‘Everyman.’’ In contrast to the mystery plays, these plays illustrate a theme such as one might hear in a sermon, such as preparation to face death or the struggles Mankind might have against the temptations of the world. The pattern in these plays is the popular one of a fall followed by redemption, the same pattern that Charles Dickens would later use in A Christmas Carol. 3. The saint play told of the life and suffering and death of a saint. In England, probably because of the Reformation, only two of these have survived, a play about the conversion of St. Paul and a play of Mary Magdalene. There are references, however, to a number of other lost English plays about saints such as Thomas a` Becket, St. Swithin, and St. Katherine, and a number of saint plays have survived from the Continent. 4. A minor genre is a miracle play, which is usually a play about some miraculous event. The only known miracle play from England is the Play of the Sacrament from the town of Croxton. It is based upon a common medieval legend in which a Jew desecrates the host and then, through the display of its miraculous powers, converts to Christianity.2

Of the four types, the mysteries and the moralities are the most important and are the ones emphasized in the rest of this chapter.

THE MYSTERY PLAYS In England, by far the most numerous plays are the mystery plays. These were civic productions associated with various towns and were often produced on Corpus Christi Day, a festival day instituted by Pope Urban IV in 1264 as a joyous celebration of Christ’s sacrifice of his body for the salvation of humankind. It usually occurs in June about eight-and-one-half weeks after Easter. It had become a festival day in England by at least 1318. It had parades associated with it in larger towns and the various guilds (organizations of tradesmen) participated in these. It was natural then for productions of plays to follow. Later some productions were shifted back to Pentecost, seven weeks after Easter. Four cycles (or series) of plays survive from fifteenth-century England: the N-Town (the extant manuscript dating ca. 1468), the York (1477), the Wakefield

Medieval Drama (dating from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, sometimes called Townely after the name of the family that owned the manuscript), and the Chester (compiled between 1467 and 1540). The plays would have been performed earlier than the dates given; there were records, for example, that the Chester plays were performed as early as 1422. The N-Town cycle is not associated with a particular town. The ‘‘N’’ possibly stood for Latin nomen (name), and it may have been a series of plays written for a traveling company that went from town to town. In addition to these cycles, we have the list of plays of one cycle no longer extant that was performed at the town of Beverly. There are also several non-cyclic or individual plays surviving, such as a play about Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of Isaac, found in the Brome manuscript, or a play about Adam and Eve that had been part of a cycle in the town of Norwich. In recent years scholars have been collecting data from public record offices in various parts of England, and these records, published by the University of Toronto Press in the series Records of Early English Drama, indicate that although most plays have been lost, many towns and districts had considerable dramatic activity in the Middle Ages. (In addition to the ones mentioned, records have so far been published for Bristol, Cambridge, Coventry, Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire, Devon, Dorset, Cornwall, Herfordshire, Worcestershire, Lancashire, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Oxfordshire, Shropshire, Somerset, and Sussex.) Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, for example, which is set in Oxford, relies on its reader’s familiarity with the medieval play about Noah’s flood, although no cycle of plays survives from either Oxford or London, where Chaucer lived.

Topics of Mystery Plays Of the four cycles that have survived, many have plays that cover the same topics. These were intended as plays that taught the essential truths of Christianity, based upon the Bible and upon legends (such as the rebellion of Satan against God and the ensuing War in Heaven) that had developed from suggestions in the Bible. The plays were produced for an audience in which a great many people would have been illiterate; and they were a way to educate and supplement the teachings of the church. Plays that were invariably performed were those that told of the fall of Satan and of the Creation and Fall of Adam and Eve, stories that explained the reason for the damnation of humankind and thus the necessity for the incarnation of Christ. The cycles usually included the story of Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, since people needed to understand that the Fall was not complete with the act of disobedience represented by Adam and Eve’s eating the forbidden fruit and that the human race would sink a lot lower. Some Old Testament stories were chosen because they were thought to foreshadow or correspond to events in the New Testament: thus Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of his

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Western Drama through the Ages son Isaac was seen as a ‘‘figure’’ of a later, greater event, God’s sacrifice of his son; the story of Noah was understood to foreshadow the final destruction of the world, and the waters of the flood, which destroyed the evil of the world, were also seen to represent the water of baptism which eliminated the effects of original sin; Noah’s ark, which carried those on board to salvation, was seen as a representation of the church. In the New Testament, some of the vernacular plays presented the same stories that were also a part of the liturgical dramatic tradition, such as the birth of Christ and the visits of the shepherds and wise men, Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, and the resurrection of Christ, as well as other stories, such as the passion and death of Christ, that were generally not presented in liturgical drama. The conclusion to a cycle was inevitably Judgment Day at which time the righteous ascended to Heaven and the wicked descended to Hell.

Productions of Mystery Plays The anonymous dramatists of these plays, whether trained in the classical tradition that literature was to delight as well as teach or simply having the common sense to know that didactic literature is more effective if it entertains, added a considerable amount of non-biblical material to the content of these plays or at least elaborated considerably upon the stories given them in the Bible. Many of the additions were comic and crude and of a type not likely to be found in religious drama of later periods. The book of Genesis, for example, simply indicates that Noah had a wife; the English dramatists present her as a comic shrew and Noah as a hen-pecked husband, who, after talking to God, is afraid to go home and tell his wife that he is to build the ark; and she naturally does not care for its appearance since she can not distinguish the front from the back; in one of the plays she refuses to get on board because she does not want to leave her friends and a slapstick fight breaks out between Noah and his wife. In the best known of the mystery plays, the Wakefield Second Shepherd’s Play (so named because the manuscript also includes a different earlier version), there is a plot in which a medieval con-artist named Mak steals a sheep from the shepherds who are watching their flocks by night, and, indeed, the plot does present a comic parallel to the story of the birth of the lamb of God. The dramatists also made the most of the notorious villains like Cain, Pharaoh, Herod, and, in the passion plays, the Jewish priests Caiphas and Annas, the Roman soldiers who crucified Christ, and, sometimes, Pontius Pilate. Herod, in particular, was a blustering tyrant, as was Pilate in the Wakefield cycle, and both would threaten the audience. When Mel Gibson’s controversial film ‘‘The Passion of the Christ’’ opened on Ash Wednesday of 2004, a number of critics condemned it for what they perceived as its anti-Semitism. David van Biema, in an essay on the film in Time, March 1, 2004, described it as ‘‘theologically in tune with the times—the 1300s.’’

Medieval Drama Certainly some of the Passion plays, in England and on the Continent, had antiSemitism in them (although in England Jews had been driven out of the country about two hundred years before the vernacular plays began to be produced and it is doubtful anyone in the audience would have ever seen a Jew). However, whether one considers Gibson’s film anti-Semitic or not, there were two major differences between his film and the medieval productions. One is that while his film focused on one element in the story, the suffering of Christ, that was but one element of the whole story of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ that the medieval productions presented, and thus the torture of Christ received less emphasis. In this respect, the effect of the medieval productions was more like the effect one gets from reading the whole story in the Bible rather than one episode from it. The other difference is that the realistic brutality of Gibson’s film would have exceeded anything that could have been presented on the medieval stage, even though the crucifixion play from the York cycle is, judging from its dialogue, brutal. Medieval productions, however, usually lacked the realism of which modern film is capable. What is said about realism or lack of it in medieval productions must be qualified because accounts of productions differ, and English plays may have been less realistically presented than some of those staged on the Continent. Evidence of the types of props used, such as several yards of ‘‘red sea,’’ indicate minimal realism, and the word used to describe a production (English ‘‘play,’’ Latin ludus, French jeu) suggests a game rather than reality. Some productions of Christ’s crucifixion, as well as Continental productions depicting the mutilations of saints, used dummies rather than live actors. Noah’s ark in English productions appears to have been a flat pre-fabricated boat with wooden animals on board. Some productions on the Continent, however, must have been fairly graphic; one illustration of a production in France shows a saint’s entrails being drawn out of his body, and they knew how to stage, in the saints’ plays, gory beheadings. Similarly there are records in Bourges of an arena filled with water for Noah’s flood with wine barrels pouring out water from above to represent the rain. The methods by which some of the civic biblical dramas were staged precluded much realism. In larger towns like York and Chester the productions were performed on pageant wagons that were drawn through the streets from one station to another on the day (or days) of the performance, since in some cases the productions took two or three days to complete. Wagons were also used on the Continent in, for example, Lille and Bologna. Scholars have been uncertain about the size of these wagons and how they could be maneuvered through the narrow streets of medieval towns, and some of the action would probably have had to have taken place in the streets in front of where the wagons came to a stop. In large towns like York the various plays were assigned to guilds of tradesmen with the intention, in some cases, of assigning appropriate plays to each group;

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Western Drama through the Ages thus in York the shipwrights produced the play of the building of Noah’s ark; the goldsmiths, the adoration of the magi; and the bakers, the Last Supper. In Chester, the butchers produced the play about the attempted stoning of the woman taken in adultery; the ironmongers, the crucifixion; and the cooks and innkeepers (presumably because they had access to ovens) Christ’s harrowing of hell. In small towns, probably only one group, such as a group at the local church, put on the plays in a fixed location on a platform. Both the wagons and the fixed platforms were equipped with trap doors so that in the play about the fall of the rebel angels, the angels could fall through the floor of the stage and then emerge from underneath as hideous devils. Similarly, there were means to hoist actors aloft. In one of the plays about the ascension of Christ into Heaven, Christ says ‘‘Send down a cloud, Father,’’ and after a cloud descends from above, Christ gets on it and ascends to Heaven. Those producing the plays made little attempt to provide special costuming with the notable exceptions of devils (often with fireworks attached to their tails), angels (sometimes shiny gold wings, sometimes wings made of peacock feathers) and God (usually a white beard, crown, and gold face). Characters like Herod and Pharaoh could be distinguished from others by their crowns and scepters. For the most part, however, characters wore contemporary dress. There was no attempt, as there is in modern plays and films, to reproduce the costumes of an earlier era. This was due, in part, to the fact that many people in the Middle Ages did not have a sense of historical change or would even have been aware that people in an earlier time would have dressed or behaved or talked differently or would have had different concerns or worries. Anachronisms were commonplace. Roman soldiers in the plays would be dressed like medieval knights. The shepherds of the nativity plays would swear in the name of Christ or Pilate, and Herod could swear allegiance to Mohammed. The shepherds complain about high taxes and harsh employers, and the plays contain references to corrupt sheriffs and priests, more suitable to late medieval England than to the times in which the plays were historically set. This makes the stories seem immediate and contemporary just as in medieval art biblical scenes showing people in contemporary dress would have sent a message, lost to modern viewers, that the people in biblical times were not much different from those looking at the art. As in later sixteenth-century English drama, the acting was done primarily by men, and by laymen, not clergy, although there are records of occasional performances by women. Drama on the Continent was similar to that in England in that much of it consisted of dramatizations of biblical stories. However, while in England the same biblical stories were dramatized in most of the cycles, in France a number of other stories, such those of Job, Daniel, and Esther, were presented on stage in an enormous series of plays based upon the Old Testament. There are also many plays about saints that have survived, as one might expect in a Roman

Medieval Drama Catholic country, and a long 61,000 line series of plays about the acts of the apostles. Moreover, while biblical drama in England was free to the public and financed by tradesmen, in France the plays tended to be community projects, staged in outdoor theaters, and those attending had to pay admission. There was also a rich tradition of liturgical drama in Italy, and the oldest known Latin passion play, not usually a part of liturgical drama, was produced in the twelfth century at Montecassino. Close to 600 medieval Dutch plays are extant. Although only one fragment of a secular farce (Interludium de clerico et puella [Interlude (or play) about the clerk and the maiden]) survives in England, there was apparently much more secular drama on the Continent. In France, there were farces, like the thirteenth-century Le Garcon et l’Aveugle, which consists almost solely of a series of cruel tricks played by a boy upon a blind man. There was also more uplifting secular drama, such as a play about the Patient Griselda, a moral story known to readers in England through Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, and there were plays on secular historical subjects, such as Julius Caesar, the destruction of Troy, or the siege of Orle´ans (a play that included Joan of Arc, long before she became a saint). In Germany there survive almost as many secular plays (155) as religious ones (162).

THE MORALITY PLAY The other major type of English play, the morality, illustrates the medieval love of allegory and its use to present theological lessons. Three English morality plays have survived in their entirety, as well as a fragment of another one entitled The Pride of Life. The best known morality and the most frequently produced today is the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century play Everyman, which was translated from a Dutch original. The story concerns a well-to-do Everyman, who is absorbed in things of the world until Death approaches him and tells him that he must take a journey to face eternal judgment and to give God an account of how he has spent his life. Frightened, he offers Death a bribe of £1,000 (a fortune in those days) if he will postpone the journey. Death, however, is honest and has no use for money, but he does give Everyman time to find a companion who will go with him. At first Everyman asks those he had trusted most (Fellowship, Cousin, Kindred, and Goods) to take the journey with him and all come up with excuses. (Cousin has a cramp in her toe, and Goods even laughs in his face and tells him he has been a fool to trust him.) He finally turns to his Good Deeds, who, because of neglect, is too weak to stand up, but she nevertheless agrees to accompany him, and she directs him to other worthwhile companions (such as Knowledge) who accompany him to the grave. Although the play was written to illustrate the doctrine of salvation through good deeds (the only one to descend into the grave with him), in its representation of misplaced values and in its

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Western Drama through the Ages presentation of a situation familiar to most people, that of being let down by those that they had always relied on, it is still effective drama. The other two complete moralities, The Castle of Perseverance and Mankind have much broader scope: instead of depicting Everyman’s journey toward death, both of these plays begin with the birth of Mankind and follow him through the various pitfalls and temptations until he finally achieves salvation. The Castle of Perseverance is a long play (about 3,700 lines) with a cast of 36 characters and a setting that ranges from the world to Heaven. It depicts Mankind being tempted by the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, resisting sin and taking refuge in the Castle of Perseverance where he is besieged by the seven deadly sins but defended by the corresponding virtues. The play Mankind has a similar plot covering birth to death and salvation; but this play is much simpler than The Castle of Perseverance and has just seven characters and is 914 lines long. It was probably performed by a traveling troop of actors who staged the play in inn yards. It is a lively play with crude comedy from the tempters Mischeff, New Guise, and Nowadays, who at one point lead the audience in a scatological sing-along. Scholars of the early twentieth century labeled it degenerate, but it should play well today. Some plays were a hybrid of the historical characters of the type found in the mystery plays and abstractions found in the moralities. The N-Town Cycle includes a play intended as a prelude to the New Testament plays: the cycle opens with a debate in Heaven between the four daughters of God: Peace, Justice, Truth, and Mercy. In the same cycle, the play Death of Herod, has as characters Death who kills Herod and devils who take him away to Hell. The best illustration of this mix of the mystery and morality plays is in the long fifteenth-century saint play Mary Magdalene (2,144 lines). In early church tradition Mary Magdalene was identified with other characters who appear in the Bible: she is thought to have been the sinful woman who anointed Christ’s feet with ointment and also with the Mary who is the sister of Lazarus and Martha. Thus the play draws upon these biblical characters as well as other biblical/historical figures like Herod, Pilate, and Tiberius Caesar but also includes a number of abstractions that are drawn from the tradition of the morality plays including the World, the Flesh, the Devil, the seven deadly sins, Satan, a bad angel, and a good angel.

INFLUENCE OF MEDIEVAL PLAYS ON LATER DRAMA This mixture of abstractions and historical characters carries over into plays of the sixteenth century like Cambises, a historical play whose cast includes characters with names like Diligence and Shame, and most notably Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, one of the great tragedies of the late sixteenth century. The latter includes among its characters a good angel, a bad angel, and the seven deadly sins. Moreover, the morality theme of the struggle of the forces of good and

Medieval Drama evil for a man’s soul is the major theme of that play, but instead of ending happily like The Castle of Perseverance and Mankind, it ends in tragedy. Just as the mystery plays are seen to foreshadow the sixteenth century plays concerned with secular history, like Shakespeare’s Richard II or Henry V, the moralities foreshadow tragedies, like Dr. Faustus or King Lear, in the latter of which major complex characters (Lear, Gloucester) are torn between characters who are extremes of good (Cordelia, Kent, Edgar, Albany) and evil (Goneril, Regan, Edmund, Cornwall). Medieval plays continued to influence sixteenth century drama in other ways, such as the tradition of using male actors, the unrealistic techniques of staging, and the practice of traveling companies putting on performances in inn yards. It is important too to remember that the production of mystery and morality plays did not end with the beginning of the sixteenth century but they continued to be performed as other types of drama were developing. The Chester cycle was performed as late as 1575, and the latest record of a production of one of the medieval plays in England was the early seventeenth century. Hamlet’s reference to actors who ‘‘out-Herod Herod’’ is a reference to the tyrannical king of the mystery plays, which Shakespeare had probably seen performed. Some have suggested that it was probably Puritan influence late in the century that ended the production of the plays since the plays were frequently boisterous, irreverent, and out-of-keeping with newer religious sentiments that developed when religion became more of a Sunday event than a part of everyday life. The church became in many ways more remote, and religious subjects came to be treated with more reverence, with less tolerance for the mixture of religion and slapstick comedy. However, the plays’ disappearance in Protestant England during Elizabeth’s reign may be due as much to their evocation of past Roman Catholic traditions, and productions may have ended as much for political as for religious reasons. On the Continent, both Luther and Calvin had approved of the production of plays on biblical subjects, but Protestants generally disapproved of the appearance of God on stage, and this limited the scope of what could be presented. Liturgical dramas, however, continued to be produced in churches in Roman Catholic areas of Germany until the seventeenth century, and in the seventeenth century a new biblical drama was produced there, the passion play of Oberammergau, which was deeply indebted to medieval dramatic traditions. It continues to be produced, with modifications, every ten years. In Italy the Church itself turned against drama, and people became more interested in secular plays, but the tradition of liturgical drama lingered on in Spain where some of the plays continued to be produced into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A number of productions of medieval plays have been staged in modern times. In England the city of York has presented them at various times on wagons as they were done in the Middle Ages. The city of Durham in 1990 presented them in Durham cathedral, with the cast drawn, as they were in medieval times, from

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Western Drama through the Ages various tradesmen in town. And there have been modernized productions as well, including a modern dress TV production of Everyman that begins in a gambling casino and a six-hour production of the mystery plays, adapted by Tony Harrison and directed by Bill Bryden, that was staged in London and filmed for the BBC in 1985. These productions have attracted large audiences and indicate that even in a secular age in which the church is no longer a dominant part of many people’s lives, these plays can still entertain and are still powerful drama.

NOTES 1. Productions of the Daniel and Herod, with appropriate music, were directed by Noah Greenberg in the 1960s for Pro Musica at the Cloisters at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. They were also recorded and had touring companies that performed at places that could provide appropriate medieval settings, such as the chapel at Duke University. 2. Scholars are not always in agreement about the use of the term miracle play. Some scholars, for example, sometimes use the term miracle play to refer to the mystery plays based on the Bible, and others sometimes use it to refer to plays about saints.

FURTHER READING Axton, Richard. European Drama of the Early Middle Ages. London: Hutchison, 1974. Beacham, Richard C. The Roman Theatre and Its Audience. London: Routledge, 1991. Beadle, Richard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Bevington, David, ed. Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. Davidson, Clifford, ed. The Saint Play in Medieval Europe. Medieval Institute Publications. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1986. Frank, Grace. The Medieval French Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954. Harris, John Wesley. Medieval Theatre in Context. London: Routledge, 1992. Kolve, V.A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966. Muir, Lynette R. The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Ogden, Dunbar H. The Staging of Drama in the Medieval Church. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002. Potter, Robert A. The English Morality Play. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Simon, Eckehard, ed. The Theatre of Medieval Europe: New Research in Early Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Tydeman, William. The Theatre in the Middle Ages: Western European Stage Conditions c. 800–1576. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Wickham, Glynne. The Medieval Theatre. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Woolf, Rosemary. The English Mystery Plays. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972.


Restoration Drama John M. Ware

THE TERM AND THE TIMES Although labels for British drama derive from historical periods (medieval), monarchs (Elizabethan, Jacobean, or Caroline), and intellectual movements (Renaissance), Restoration drama draws our attention to its explicit connection with a single political event: the restoration of Charles II, the third Stuart king, to the throne of England in 1660. From 1645 to 1658, England had been ruled by Oliver Cromwell and a variety of Parliamentary and military leaders. Cromwell’s son Richard succeeded him in 1658 only to find his authority deteriorating. Notwithstanding complications regarding its own authority, the House of Commons invited Charles II to return to the throne in 1660. Regardless of the celebration of Restoration, Charles II returned to rule a nation irrevocably changed by the strife it had undergone; the England of 1660 could never be the England of 1625, when Charles I had succeeded James I. Parliament restored the king but resisted any exercise of power that implied the crown’s authority over Parliament itself. For the most part, Charles II avoided open conflict with Parliament and so avoided testing the limits of his authority and Parliament’s tolerance. The same cannot be said for James II, whose brief rule, 1685–88, was marked by the desire to reassert the authority of the crown in defiance of Parliamentary power. Out of fear over James’s desire for power, his attempts to recognize Roman Catholicism, and the birth of his son, which meant a Roman Catholic successor to the throne of Protestant England, Parliament forced James into exile in 1688. Despite the end of Stuart rule in 1688, the term Restoration applies to literature produced until the end of the century. To that extent, the Restoration label masks some of the significant changes that take place during the forty years between

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Western Drama through the Ages 1660 and 1700, most significantly England’s conscious commitment to a constitutional monarchy in which the authority of the ruling monarch is bound by both the preexisting system of government and the power of the Parliament. The moment of this commitment is typically referred to as the Glorious Revolution or the Bloodless Revolution and involved the invitation extended William of Orange, a Protestant Dutch prince, and his wife Mary, Protestant daughter of James II, to succeed to the English throne abandoned by James II. While the Stuart line would maintain pretensions to the throne of England by right until 1745, when a last and nearly successful attempt was made to regain the throne by force, the Glorious Revolution marks a settling of numerous issues: the extent of the crown’s authority, the freedoms guaranteed by law to all English citizens, and broader tolerance for different forms of religious expression. Despite the return of the king in 1660, the forty years constituting the Restoration see England become a nation rather than a kingdom and the English become citizens rather than subjects. Just as the term Restoration belies the political changes that Charles II faced upon his return to England in 1660, it also obscures the social changes that had taken place between 1642 and 1660, a period referred to as the Interregnum. One area in which historians emphasize change is in the centrality of the court. Without the court at the epicenter of patronage during the Interregnum, other organizations took an interest in the arts. Although audiences lacked performances to attend after Cromwell’s government closed the theaters in 1642, they could still find print versions of plays to read. Moreover, the burst of pamphleteering that took place during this time led printers, booksellers, and authors to take a greater interest in the reading audience, so much so that printers and booksellers began to commission works based on what they determined to be the tastes of their audience. The relationship between dramatic production and audience remained significant throughout the seventeenth century as writers debated the merits and effects of Restoration drama. But clearly the court did return in 1660 and with it the difficulty of accommodating this court and courtly values in general to changed circumstances. Courtly ideals upheld the social hierarchy, the established church, and the preeminence of the monarch. Of course, all of these ideals were already compromised by the time the court was invited to return to England. Even though Charles II patronized learning in the arts and sciences, the results did not always reinstate the courtly ideals of an earlier age or the ideas he had imbibed while in exile in France. John Dryden, appointed poet laureate in 1670, was conversant with the ideas of Nicolas Boileau, Pierre Corneille, and Rene´ Rapin, but was determined to keep the ideas of Roman predecessors and French practitioners as influences upon English drama rather than as ideals to be realized or examples to be imitated. Dryden had a good grasp of English literary history and sought to maintain a distinctly English identity in his dramatic and poetic productions. In fact, even

Restoration Drama within the narrow selection of dramas we review in this chapter, one can see courtly ideals being questioned, contested, defended, and revised. In his efforts to reinvigorate drama, which had become the preeminent English literary form before the close of the theaters, Charles II issued patents for two theater companies: one to Thomas Killigrew for the King’s Company and the other to William Davenant for the Duke’s Company. At the time the new patents were issued by Charles, there were very few experienced playwrights or producers; the new companies had to negotiate rights to the stock of existing plays and sought to acquire not only theaters and actors, but playwrights as well. As Restoration politics is marked to some extent by return, so is Restoration drama. At the most basic level, the Restoration marked the return of public performance. But just as the monarchy was restored in a different fashion, so the Restoration theater differed from its Renaissance predecessor. One immediately noticeable difference was the employment of women to play female roles. Although it took some time before actual theaters were constructed to accommodate the new companies, when finished, the theaters boasted several improvements. Rather than extending into the audience in the manner of the Renaissance stage, the Restoration stage extended further back, allowing for layers of scenery to create a sense of perspective or simply to facilitate changes in scene. This deep stage contained several parallel grooves in which panels of scenery fit and could be slid on or off stage. Other changes included the installation of trap doors and elaborate rigging to create special effects such as appearance, disappearance, or flight. While the size of the theater determined to some extent the seating arrangement, all Restoration theaters included a pit or large open space in front of the stage behind which were galleries and boxes. The pit proved to be a popular place for the more vocal audience members. Productions involved more than the play; they included music, the main piece, an entr’acte, and an afterpiece with all parts usually amounting to roughly three hours of entertainment. Productions were varied, meaning that the company tried to mix the types of plays produced in order to offer their audience a variety. And while Charles was critical to the success of Restoration drama through his patronage and attendance, the audience did not consist solely of aristocratic individuals—it ran the gamut from the aristocratic to the genteel to the professional to those in service. As mentioned before, the audience itself interested writers. Not only did playwrights and managers look to the audience in order to answer their tastes, but playwrights often addressed the audience in their prologues and epilogues, and writers such as the diarist Samuel Pepys recorded the details of the audience in addition to those of the performance—both were subjects worthy of observation and record. For the purposes of this chapter, we will look at three plays in particular. Although playwrights were at a premium in 1660, they were legion by the end of

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Western Drama through the Ages the Restoration and wrote in a wide variety of forms. The three plays we review are examples of heroic drama, dramatic satire, and the comedy of manners. Restoration playwrights wrote a number of interesting tragedies, but they are not typically celebrated for their efforts in this form. Just as the number of plays we discuss falls well short of those meriting attention, the number of writers is attenuated as well. The plays addressed here were written by John Dryden; George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham; and William Wycherley. This slice of the talented and successful playwrights of the period excludes many notable dramatists, one in particular is Aphra Behn. While Behn was not the first female playwright of the Restoration era, she was easily the most prolific, successful, and influential. Like Dryden, Behn wrote successfully in forms other than drama, and much of her writing, even that which draws on earlier works for inspiration, demonstrates the way in which writers wove issues of the moment, especially politics, into their art. At the time, Behn represented an especially interesting subject for commentary as she wrote Restoration comedy in the manner of her male peers: witty, ribald, and cynical. Her success prompted discussion of the way in which women should write, a topic relevant to the Restoration drama that so often toyed with the extent to which women were naturally ‘‘modest.’’ We’ll discuss the plays chronologically rather than generically: first, an example of heroic drama, John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada, first performed in 1670; second, an example of dramatic satire or the critical burlesque, George Villiers’s The Rehearsal, first performed in 1671; and third, an example of the comedy of manners, William Wycherley’s The Country Wife, most likely first performed in 1675. The order of discussion is serendipitous in that Restoration comedy certainly had the most lasting impact on the drama that succeeded it and the audience that viewed it. This chapter closes with some consideration of that effect. The Restoration period ends with a scathing attack on the immorality and deleterious effects of Restoration comedies in the form of Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698). While its length and vehemence make it seem the result of a crabbed and prudish intellect, Collier raises interesting points about the relation between drama and society, found a sympathetic audience at the time, and has some relevance to contemporary controversies over media.

JOHN DRYDEN AND HEROIC DRAMA Heroic drama is a fit form to open this discussion since it demonstrates the links between the early seventeenth century theater and the Restoration theater. Despite the ban on public performances during the Interregnum, William Davenant was permitted to stage operas, and in 1656, he staged The Siege of Rhodes, a heroic drama that not only modeled the plot elements for later heroic

Restoration Drama dramas, such as conflicts between love and honor, martial heroes and virtuous heroines, and exotic settings sprinkled with historical detail, but also included such elements of production as songs, music, elaborate scenery, special effects, and women performing female roles. Davenant’s intention through this drama was to impress the audience with grandeur: intense emotions and grand ideas raised to their highest pitch. During the Restoration, Dryden adopted the form. Heroic drama allowed Dryden to stage epic poetry, the highest form of poetry for those who held to the classical hierarchy of poetic forms. Dryden wrote his heroic drama in what became known as the heroic couplet: rhymed, iambic pentameter couplets, a form whose expressive power stemmed both from the ease with which it is read and the numerous opportunities the couplet afforded for making the ‘‘sound’’ underscore the ‘‘sense.’’ Heroic dramas included other conventions. The main characters were extraordinary both in terms of their birth (deriving from nobility) and in terms of their character (demonstrating extreme valor, courage, idealism, or virtue). Like the characters, the action of heroic dramas tended toward the extreme by including events that were most improbable and constructing plots that were often complex (including a great variety of action) without being intricate (failing to link the action in a particularly coherent way); that is, the plot of these dramas often accumulates without exhibiting a sophisticated or artful design. At the end of heroic dramas, the virtuous tend to be rewarded and villainous punished, which distinguishes heroic drama from tragedy; this distinction suggests that the function of heroic drama, like epic poetry, is to excite awe and admiration rather than effect an emotional catharsis. People have found heroic drama an odd form to coexist with the witty, bawdy, and sometimes deeply cynical Restoration comedies, but the popularity of heroic drama, which is typically seen as running from 1664–80, can be explained by the excitement with which the reopened theaters were greeted, by the desire on the part of theater managers to present audiences with a variety of forms of drama (from heroic drama to comedy, from the old to the new), and perhaps also by the spectacle that such dramas provided—the foreign worlds conjured in contrast to the more prosaic and familiar worlds of the comedies. The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards: Part I (Almanzor and Almahide; or, The Conquest of Granada) (1670) is Dryden’s fourth heroic drama, and though in its entirety it consists of two parts and ten acts, parts one and two were performed a year apart. In the play, fifteenth-century Granada is besieged by the Christian armies of Ferdinand, king of Spain. Mahomet Boabdelin, the king of Granada, faces not only the challenge of the Christian armies, but also the challenge of reconciling a populace divided into factions along family lines: the Zegrys and the Abencerrages. Act 1 alone sees the introduction of a mysterious but aweinspiring stranger, Almanzor, hostilities between the two factions that are subdued

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Western Drama through the Ages only after Almanzor kills a Zegry, the conviction of Almanzor on the grounds of disobeying the king’s orders, the pardoning of Almanzor by request of Prince Abdalla, the king’s brother, more factional fighting that is subdued not by the king but by Almanzor on the king’s behalf, and a threatening visit from the Duke of Arcos, the general to Ferdinand. Whether or not Dryden intended to comment on the political landscape of Restoration England, one can see in the play cautionary notes regarding the perils of factionalism and the need for a strong central ruler. King Boabdelin explains to the leaders of each faction that their ‘‘intestine strife’’ weakens the state and aids its enemies, yet he lacks the authority by which to overcome the costs already accrued in factional fighting. Rather than forcing his subjects to acknowledge their obligation to the state and their king as representative of that state, Boabdelin finds himself in the awkward and debilitating position of having to accommodate his subjects, even though they rarely accommodate him except by force or in fraud. As Boabdelin announces Almanzor’s execution, we find this snatch of dialogue raising issues of sovereignty, law, obligation, and factionalism: Almanzor: No man has more contempt than I, of breath, But whence hast thou the right to give me death? Obeyed as sovereign by thy subjects be, But know, that I alone am king of me. I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran. Boabdelin: Since, then, no pow’r above your own you know, Mankind should use you like a common foe; You should be hunted like a beast of prey; By your own law I take your life away. Almanzor: My laws are made but only for my sake; No king against himself a law can make. If thou pretend’st to be a prince like me, Blame not an act which should thy pattern be. I saw th’opprest and thought it did belong To a king’s office to redress the wrong: I brought that succor which thou ought’st to bring, And so, in nature, am thy subjects’ king.

Restoration Drama Boabdelin: I do not want your counsel to direct, Or aid to help me punish or protect. Almanzor: Thou wan’st ‘em both, or better thou wouldst know, Than to let factions in thy kingdom grow.

These lines demonstrate the compass of thought in which heroic drama eagerly indulged. The drift of the dialogue takes in everything from the origin of laws, to the application of laws, to the politics of rule. Almanzor opens by claiming that Boabdelin’s laws are state-specific and that Almanzor observes a different, and potentially higher, code. Boabdelin attempts to turn Almanzor’s code against him through a state-of-nature argument that seems reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes, but Almanzor counters with a constitutional insight: ‘‘No king a law against himself can make’’; that is, the king is not subject to but is identical with the law and therefore can never act against the law. In fact, only ministers of the king could be found guilty of infractions of English common law. Extending his insights from constitutional to natural law, Almanzor suggests that he may serve as a pattern by which Boabdelin might fashion his own policy, a suggestion that Boabdelin just as naturally resents. The king’s rejection is an example of dramatic irony in that he will time and again rely on Almanzor’s aid. Act 2 furthers two conflicts. First, Almanzor has led the forces of Granada to victory over the Castilians and brought about a cessation of factionalism. In an exchange of taunts with his prisoner, the Duke of Arcos, Almanzor promises to release him in order to gain the honor of defeating him in the next battle. We also find Prince Abdalla courting Lyndaraxa, sister to the Zegry leader Zulema. Lyndaraxa claims that there are two facts harming Abdalla’s suit: first, Lyndaraxa is already promised to the leader of the Abencerrages, and second, Abdalla is not the king. The second difficulty leads Abdalla to consider betraying his brother in order to gain the throne and the hand of Lyndaraxa. Abdalla entertains a crisis of conscience, one pitting honor and virtue against passion. In act 3, the plot continues its serpentine way. Baobdelin alienates Almanzor’s allegiance by not allowing him to free the Duke of Arcos. Abdalla enlists Almanzor’s aid in his attempt to gain the throne, which Almanzor gives not because of any ‘‘right’’ to the crown that Abdalla has contrived but strictly on the basis of his friendship with Abdalla. While Almanzor and Abdalla demonstrate the tangled web of obligation and raise questions as to primacy, Abdalla’s conversation with Abdelmelech, an Abencerrago and lover of Lyndaraxa, demonstrates the internal struggle between reason and passion, here put in political terms:

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Western Drama through the Ages Abdalla: Your counsels, noble Abdelmelech, move My reason to accept ‘em, not my love. Ah, why did heav’n leave man so weak of defence, To trust frail reason with the rule of sense! ‘Tis overpoised and kicked up in the air, While sense weighs down the scale, and keeps it there; Or, like a captive king, ‘tis borne away, And forced to count’nance its own rebel’s sway. Abdelmelech: No, no; our reason was not vainly lent; Nor is a slave, but by its own consent: If reason on his subject’s triumph wait, An easy king deserves no better fate.

Abdalla confesses the very lack of control that the drama is leading us to see marks one as unfit for leadership, yet it is this lack of control that is driving Abdalla to assume the throne. Abdelmelech counters Abdalla’s sense of helplessness by asserting that reason is complicit in any victory of passion over reason, and that any such victory is a manifest signal of the lack of regal authority. While heroic dramas give scant attention to those who are distinguished through their status, deeds, or aspirations, one can shuffle the lines of the two previous quoted passages and deal a much different hand, one that resonates with the ideas regarding the role of consent in government and in slavery that John Locke expresses in his Second Treatise on Government (1690). The point is not that Dryden anticipates Locke’s views but rather that the flights of abstraction in heroic drama are both frustrating in that one does not ‘‘lose’’ oneself in them and yet intensely interesting in that they highlight issues that occupy the brilliant minds of the Restoration. While the love of heroes can sometimes be a tedious affair, The Conquest of Granada makes some interesting observations on male/female relations. It may be difficult to admire Lyndaraxa’s ambition to be queen and difficult to approve of her manipulation of her contesting lovers, but she does resist submitting to male dominance. In her conversation with Abdelmelech, she refuses to accord him dominance over her behavior and anticipates his stereotypical lament: Lyndaraxa: And when did I my pow’r so far resign, That you should regulate each look of mine? Adelmelech: Then, when you gave your love, you gave that pow’r.

Restoration Drama Lyndaraxa: ‘Twas during pleasure, ‘tis revoked this hour. Now call me false, and rail on womankind— ‘Tis all the remedy you’re like to find.

The act continues with a revolt of the Zegrys led by Abdalla and Almanzor. Boabdelin faces them leaving his betrothed, Almahide, and Lyndaraxa in a tower. Almanzor forces his way into the castle, meets Almahide, falls in love with her, and learns of her vow to Boabdelin. When Abdalla asks Almanzor how he can reward him for his efforts, Almanzor answers that he can free Almahide. Before Abdalla acts, Zulema enters and asks Abdalla to grant Almahide to him. Sensing Abdalla’s willingness to accommodate Zulema, Almanzor revokes his friendship with Abdalla and storms off. Act 4 opens with Almanzor offering his services to Boabdelin, the king he was fighting against in act 3. The bulk of the act is taken up with the love affairs of Lyndaraxa and Almahide, each of whom wrestles with earlier vows and competing lovers. In Lyndaraxa’s case, we find her managing her situation with admirable wit but also a growing willingness toward cruelty. As has been the case throughout the play, inconstancy underscores failure of character: Lyndaraxa: O could I read the dark decrees of fate, That I might once know whom to love, or hate! For I myself scarce my own thoughts can guess, So much I find ‘em varied by success. As in some weather-glass, my love I hold; Which falls or rises with the heat or cold. I will be constant yet, if fortune can; I love the king:—let her but name the man.

In addition to Dryden’s witty inversion of Lydaraxa’s love (she loves the king but awaits the outcome of the rebellion to know which man that will be), the lines also demonstrate his penchant for choosing odd if intriguing similes. The weather-glass, a combination thermometer-barometer, was a seventeenth century invention. As opposed to Wycherley’s comedy with its repeated reference to a few areas of common concern, primarily sex and gambling, Dryden’s writing draws from so many aspects of seventeenth century life for its similes and metaphors that some vehicles were deemed inappropriate for the meaning they were to convey or the situations in which they were to be voiced. Act 4 ends with Almanzor’s rescue of Almahide, and in response to his confession of love she suggests that he should take his suit to Boabdelin and her father, Abenamar.

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Western Drama through the Ages Act 5 opens with Abdalla, whose rebellion has failed, entreating Lyndaraxa to shelter him, but she refuses him because he never managed to become king. The persistence of family prejudice continues to mark other lovers and presages both that there will have been few lessons learned over these tumultuous acts and also that there must needs be a sequel. Leaping into the drama’s vicious circle, Boabdelin vows to reward Almanzor’s aid with whatever he may desire, and Almanzor asks Boabdelin to surrender Almahide to him. This piece of insolence earns Almanzor his second doom of execution from Boabdelin, which Almanzor escapes through the request of Almahide. These two lovers share an extended and topical metaphor at their parting: Almanzor: My joys, indeed, are dreams; but not my pain: ‘Twas a swift ruin, but the marks remain. When some fierce fire lays goodly buildings waste, Would you conclude There had been none, because the burning’s past? Almahide: It was your fault that fire seized all your breast; You should have blown up some to save the rest: But ‘tis, at worst, but so consumed by fire, As cities are, that by their falls rise high’r. Build love a nobler temple in my place; You’ll find the fire has but enlarged the space. Almanzor: Love has undone me; I am grown so poor, I sadly view the ground I had before, But want a stock, and ne’er can build it more.

In September of 1666, fire swept through London destroying much of city and displacing much of its populace. Dryden capitalizes on this event as he did in other works. The passage also demonstrates Dryden’s ability to write brisk and witty dialogue in which characters extend each other’s thoughts. Almanzor first broaches fire as metaphor, but Almahide continues it in order to make her point. This technique of not only understanding but co-opting another’s imagery is a favorite device in Restoration drama. It demonstrates both perceptiveness (the intelligence necessary to understand another’s point) and invention (the imagination necessary to continue the metaphor but direct it to one’s own ends). Perception and invention were critical elements to Restoration writers’ concept of wit.

Restoration Drama

GEORGE VILLIERS AND DRAMATIC SATIRE Work on The Rehearsal began as early as 1663, at which time George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and others began to satirize the heroic dramas of Davenant and Robert Howard. In 1665, London suffered an outbreak of plague, the first of the two devastating events to take place between 1665 and 1666 (the second was the afore-mentioned fire). In response to the plague, the theaters closed and people of means vacated the city. By the time that work on The Rehearsal resumed, Dryden had become one of the leading figures in heroic drama, and Villiers accordingly took him and The Conquest of Granada as the main targets of his satire. He lampooned Dryden in the character of Bayes, the playwright, and Almanzor, Dryden’s protagonist of The Conquest of Granada, through the character of Drawcansir. To an extent, The Rehearsal became a roman a` clef of heroic drama: its characters satirized a variety of playwrights and their creations, its scenery satirized heroic drama’s excesses, and its text satirized myriad lines from dramas other than Dryden’s. So specific was the satire in some points that a key to the play was published in the early eighteenth century. The Rehearsal did not end the popularity of heroic drama. Although Dryden made his last contribution in 1671, such dramas remained popular for another decade and continued to be written and performed well into the eighteenth century. Perhaps the more interesting impact of The Rehearsal was its critique of drama from within drama—accomplished in two ways. First, The Rehearsal is a play about plays and playwrights. Second, The Rehearsal is a play within a play. This combination of perspective and technique proved profitable to writers in prose, poetry, and drama during the eighteenth century. In addition to such multilayered satires as Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub: Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind (1704) and Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad Variorum (1729), we find two particularly notable dramatic satires in Henry Fielding’s The Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Critic; or, A Tragedy Rehearsed (1779). Undoubtedly influential, The Rehearsal is also amusing in its own right. Its mode of satire is typically seen as burlesque, meaning that within the play we realize a discrepancy between the style and the substance, a discrepancy that typically involves exaggerating the style in relation to the substance. Although more complex definitions of burlesque exist, the important points to keep in mind in connection with The Rehearsal are its assumption that heroic drama was in and of itself a burlesque (the bombastic presentation of common and occasionally nonsensical ideas) and the various forms of satire in which it indulged: exaggeration, parody, and the reduction of its target to absurdity. The prologue to The Rehearsal indicates the means of conducting the satire; the play will represent heroic drama in such a light that people can see it for what it is. Heroic drama will, in a sense, be unmasked:

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Western Drama through the Ages We might as well call this short mock-play of ours A posy made of weeds instead of flowers; Yet such have been presented to your noses, And there are such, I fear, who thought ‘em roses. Would some of ‘em were here, to see, this night, What stuff it is in which they took delight. Here, brisk, insipid rogues, for wit, let fall Sometimes dull sense; but oft’ner, none at all.

The imposture of heroic drama will be made sensible, plain, evident; a fit intent for an increasingly empirical age and nation. Satire most often seeks to justify its fury by claiming that knowing is the first step on the way to reformation. The Prologue is no exception to this pattern: . . .[I]f by my endeavors, you grow wise, And what you once so praised shall now despise, Then I’ll cry out, swelled with poetic rage, ‘Tis I, John Lacy, have reformed your stage.

The irony lies in the fact that Lacy, who acted the part of Bayes, would trumpet his power in a manner befitting a hero from a heroic drama. Act 1, scene 1 opens with a conversation, in prose, between two friends, Johnson and Smith, who have just encountered each other in London after Smith’s having spent some time in the country. Johnson, an avid theater-goer, notes that he has been so horrified by what he has seen in theaters of late that he is considering going into business, which he despises. Smith claims that ‘‘country wits’’ have approved of the new plays, and Johnson replies that ‘‘city wits’’ also applaud them; however, for Johnson, their approbation indicates that the new wits ‘‘scorn to imitate nature’’ and look only ‘‘to elevate and surprise.’’ When Smith asks what the phrase ‘‘elevate and surprise’’ means, Johnson responds, ‘‘Nay, by my troth, that’s a hard matter: I don’t understand that myself. ‘Tis a phrase they have got among them, to express their no-meaning by. I’ll tell you, as near as I can, what it is. Let me see; ‘tis fighting, loving, sleeping, rhyming, dying, dancing, singing, crying; and everything but thinking and sense.’’ In addition to addressing the critical concept of wit and introducing one of Restoration drama’s favorite targets for satire, business, the opening dialogue demonstrates the extent to which The Rehearsal is invested in dramatic criticism. Before we encounter even the slightest hint of burlesque, we are presented with an appropriate, if ignored, standard for good writing (the imitation of ‘‘nature’’) and the new and as yet ill-defined standard (‘‘elevate and surprise’’). Johnson’s criticism of the new standard is not only that it has no correspondence to nature but also that it cannot be explained. The two men encounter an author, Bayes, and Johnson asks him to explain the ‘‘meaning’’ of his last play to Smith, which Bayes says he cannot do; however,

Restoration Drama Bayes notes that his new play is in its last rehearsal and invites Johnson and Smith to attend it with him. They agree. As they make their way to the theater, Bayes explains some of his rules for writing a play. One is the rule of tranversion, which not only requires that he find moments of wit in other works but that he ‘‘transverse’’ the form of those moments to a form opposite of the original: for instance, prose he turns into poetry, and poetry he turns into prose. The rule implies both a lack of originality and a degree of duplicity regarding the manner in which one’s wit is presented. Bayes not only obscures the source but potentially the wit and meaning of what he in effect plagiarizes. Another rule involves a book that he keeps in his pocket, Drama Commonplaces; rather than invent anything, he turns to this book to see what has already been written or said on any given subject. Again, the satire underscores Bayes’s lack of originality and his desire to disguise it by altering the original language: ‘‘[W]hen I have anything to invent, I never trouble my head about it, as other men do; but presently turn over this book, and there I have at one view, all that Perseus, Montaigne, Seneca’s tragedies, Horace, Juvenal, Claudian, Pliny, Plutarch’s Lives, and the rest, have ever thought upon this subject; and so, in a trice, by leaving out a few words or putting in others of my own, the business is done.’’ In act 1, scene 2, Bayes and company arrive at the rehearsal. The satire of Bayes’s self-aggrandizement and the exposure of his ineptness to Johnson and Smith continues. Over and again, we find Bayes discounting the ‘‘old plain way’’ of writing and celebrating the ‘‘new way,’’ whose advantages Johnson and Smith labor to discern. Act 2, scene 1 provides a glimpse of Bayes’s new way of writing; in this case, we witness frequent whispering between the actors on stage yet the audience remains ignorant of what is said. When asked about characterization, plot, or staging, Bayes offers a stock reply: ‘‘[I]t’s new.’’ He adds, ‘‘I despise your Jonson and Beaumont, that borrowed all they writ from nature. I am for fetching it purely from my own fancy.’’ As for what Bayes’s fancy or imagination supplies, Johnson, who has some acquaintance with Bayes’s earlier work, notes to Smith, ‘‘[I]t is, as I told thee, very fantastical, most abominably dull, and not one word to the purpose.’’ Of the three characteristics, ‘‘fantastical’’ is no longer as clearly pejorative as ‘‘dull’’ or purposeless, but Johnson is tapping a notion of fantastic that characterizes bad poetry; fantastical poetry traffics in the unreal, illusory, and irrational, and its effect on the reader cannot be anything but deleterious. In act 2, scene 3, Bayes stresses that the new way of writing demands similes to express surprise, especially extended similes. Johnson suggests that the similes often seem gratuitous rather than applicable to the occasion, and one gets the sense that the new way of writing is conspicuous, a demonstration of the poet’s imagination with only the thinnest strand of connection to the plot of the play.

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Western Drama through the Ages This disregard for plot is underscored in act 3 as well. After Bayes draws the men’s attention to some witty repartee, Smith observes that the dialogue, while brisk, is not ‘‘to the purpose, for the play does not go on.’’ Bayes:

Play does not go on? I don’t know what you mean; why is not this part of the play?

Smith:

Yes, but the plot stands still.

Bayes: Plot stand still! why, what a devil is the plot good for but to bring in fine things?

Bayes objects that one can’t stall the plot since the plot serves merely as the rationale for events, scenes, or dialogue. Bayes ascribes Smith’s concerns to his vulgarity—his inability to appreciate the ways in which Bayes exceeds ‘‘the common pitch.’’ Over the course of the play, Johnson and Smith respond differently to Bayes’s absurdities: Johnson humors Bayes while Smith confronts him. In response, Bayes develops different ideas of the critical judgment of the two men. Bayes’s sense that Smith lacks judgment is reinforced when Smith questions the placement of a song. Johnson’s mock defense of the song earns him the following commendation: ‘‘I know you have wit by the judgment you make of this play, for that’s the measure I go by—my play is my touchstone.’’ In effect, Bayes lacks any standard by which his play could be found faulty and rather assumes that his play is the means of determining the quality of other people’s judgment. The satire reinforces the notion introduced earlier of a tradition of critical tenets, an inherited understanding of what makes drama (or poetry) successful and underscores the way in which the talented, learned, and witty responded negatively to novelty. While the Restoration is often seen as a time of moral laxity, a characterization based largely on its comedies, here we see courtly writers exercising conservative critical judgments. The two positions are not antithetical, but they make for an interesting paradox in thought that should lead us to be cautious regarding blanket generalizations that we make of the Restoration as a period of unbridled license. The satire in The Rehearsal is both halter and switch, castigating heroic drama for its excesses and leading the audience back to the path of true wit. That wit shows itself in Villiers’s ability to ridicule heroic drama’s conventions. Within Bayes’s play, Prince Volscius is preparing to meet his army encamped outside of town, when he is awed by the beauty of Parthenope. Prince Volscius hesitates as she exits, and, partly dressed, indulges in this soliloquy: Volscius: How has my passion made me Cupid’s scoff! This hasty boot is on, the other off, And sullen lied, with amorous design To quit loud fame and make that beauty mine.

Restoration Drama ... My legs, the emblem of my various thought, Show to what sad distraction I am brought. Sometimes with stubborn honor, like this boot, My mind is guarded, and resolved to do’t: Sometimes, again, that very mind, by love Disarme`d, like this other leg does prove. Shall I to Honor or to Love give way? ‘‘Go on,’’ cries Honor; tender Love says, ‘‘Nay,’’ Honor aloud commands, ‘‘Pluck both boots on’’; But softer Love does whisper, ‘‘Put on none.’’

As opposed to moments of utter absurdity, the wit in such burlesque lies in part in our realization of the writer’s control of the form; that is, we realize that Villiers knows how to write effective heroic couplets. The humor then exists not only in Volscius’s choice of emblems, a pair of boots and a state of undress, for thinking through a conflict between honor and love, but also in our awareness of a talented writer lending his wit to rendering this scene. More contemporary examples of this blend of talent and ridicule exist in the writing of Christopher Guest and others in mockumentaries such as This Is Spinal Tap (1984) and especially A Mighty Wind (2003). Act 4, scene 1 continues witty burlesque and introduces the character Drawcansir, whose dialogue parodies specific lines of Almanzor in The Conquest of Granada. As amusing as the satire of Alamanzor is, one of Bayes’s most amusing innovations is to have Prince Pretty-man and Prince Volscius engage in a verse dispute over the fact that each loves a different woman. The dialogue begins as a consideration of how such a state could come to be but quickly devolves into a competition to see whose verse can most successfully represent the superiority of each prince’s lover. Instead of raising the objects of the verse higher, the verse tends to sink them lower in the audience’s estimation. We pick up at the lip of the descent: Volscius: If incense thou wilt offer at the shrine Of mighty love, burn it to none but mine. Her rosy lips external sweets exhale; And her bright flames make all flames else look pale. Pretty-man: Perhaps dull incense may thy love suffice; But mine must be adored with sacrifice. All hearts turn ashes which her eyes control: The body they consume as well as soul.

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Western Drama through the Ages Volscius: My love has yet a power more divine; Victims her altars burn not, but refine: Amidst the flames they ne’er give up the ghost, But, with her looks, revive still as they roast. In spite of pain and death, they’re kept alive: Her fiery eyes makes ‘em in fire survive. ... Let my Parthenope at length prevail. Pretty-man: I’ll sooner have a passion for a whale, In whose vast bulk, though store of oil doth lie, We find more shape, more beauty, in a fly.

In the effort to cap each other’s imagery, the imagery itself turns to the grotesque. Parthenope’s love is so powerful as to enflame and sustain her lovers so that their reward is to ‘‘roast’’ eternally. Johnson and Smith agree that Bayes has a knack for ‘‘writing smooth verse,’’ but Smith adds that Bayes’s accomplishment is one of numbers, while his failure is one of sense. Act 5 includes the climactic scene of Bayes’s play, which involves flying kings, obscure lyrics, a character who is interrupted every time she tries to speak, a battle ended by an eclipse, and the representation of said eclipse through a dance of the moon, earth, and sun. The act and the play end with Johnson and Smith sneaking away to dine while Bayes is offstage addressing the players, the players sneaking away while Bayes is offstage looking for the gentlemen, and Bayes leaving in a huff. The epilogue to The Rehearsal reiterates the centrality of traditional standards, plot, and sense to its critique of heroic drama: The play is at an end, but where’s the plot? That circumstance our poet Bayes forgot, And we can boast, though ‘tis a plotting age, No place is freer from it than the stage. The ancients plotted, though, and strove to please With sense that might be understood with ease; They every scene with so much wit did store That who brought any in, went out with more: But this new way of wit does so surprise, Men lose their wits in wond’ring where it lies.

The epilogue calls for the application of this ancient standard in order to curtail the ‘‘prodigious way of writing’’ that has become so common over ‘‘these ten years.’’ Again, Villiers demonstrates that any attribution of ‘‘license’’ to the

Restoration Drama Restoration requires elaboration. The court of Charles II and genteel entertainment involved liberties; yet subscribers to courtly lifestyles and cultured living were clearly concerned with the pretensions exercised by those who influenced public taste. To this extent, The Rehearsal is criticism modeled and performed. Although its epilogue is addressed to the audience, it targets writers of Bayes’s new way and leaves the audience relatively unscathed. While The Rehearsal devolves into absurdity at times, that absurdity is intended to echo the absurdity of the form being satirized. Moreover, The Rehearsal is elitist in some respects. It treats a form of drama that resonated with many people over a length of time as a freak or a fancy and implies that people of wit and judgment, such as Johnson and Smith are, should be able to see through heroic drama’s alluring spectacle and vapid rhetoric.

WILLIAM WYCHERLEY AND RESTORATION COMEDY Restoration comedy is most often classified as the ‘‘comedy of manners.’’ While the term is associated with the period, it also refers to a comedic approach that extends well past the seventeenth century and into other forms of literature than drama. In its approach, the comedy of manners avoids the highly stylized language of heroic dramas and the elaborate attention to love of earlier romantic comedies, and demonstrates stronger links to early seventeenth century city comedies. Restoration comedies typically focus on the codes and conduct of a particular set of people in society, most often people of property and means though not necessarily those of aristocratic status. While the action that takes place in these comedies may be intricately plotted, the events themselves are of less significance than the behavior of the characters. The characters are predictable in that we are certain to encounter fops (fools whose vanity leads them to affect characteristics they don’t possess), wits (men and women of intelligence and spirit), sharpers of various sorts, lovers, cits, and servants. All of these characters engage in intrigues having to do with sex, money, and love. Restoration comedies engage in the dramatic satire of which The Rehearsal is an example, but instead of satirizing a particular form of drama and its authors, the comedy of manners satirizes the characters who people the stage. Yet the satire is not evenly spread; we often encounter characters who are flawed yet attractive. These morally suspect characters are perceptive and imaginative; they demonstrate concern for friends, an aversion to affectation, and a delight in society. Moreover, these wits do not necessarily suffer ill consequences for their actions. In part, because of this lack of overt correction, these comedies were sometimes seen as advocating a kind of moral laxity. At the same time, comic dramatists could defend their satiric productions by arguing that their deliberate disregard of conventional social codes of conduct was intended to underscore

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Western Drama through the Ages the problems of those codes as much as the immorality of the offending characters. To an extent, this argument is legitimate. Restoration comedies model conflicts in values, and the search for advocacy of any single approach to the challenges of living in the late seventeenth century may be futile. Some critics have noted that even the attractive characters err in their judgments and that the satiric net is cast wide. But it is also the case that some aspects of Restoration comedies are disquieting. Compelling characters act in ways that are as predatory and vindictive as they are liberating. Moreover, the comedies also model a social hierarchy in which characters of wit and ability act independently of social conventions. Acting contrary to social conventions is not necessarily a bad thing, but the manipulation of flawed conventions seems a disingenuous form of critique. To some extent, the cynical implications of this revised social hierarchy, one in which wit rather than property or title garnered admiration, were softened through romantic love: witty lovers could avoid the fate that a debased society would impose on them through their application of intelligence to their situation. The Restoration myth of romantic love with a cynical twist celebrates successful if select lovers. One might conclude that while it offered abundant entertainment and reason to laugh, Restoration comedy offered little cheer. But that is, perhaps, the bitter aftertaste of a delightful satire. The Country Wife (1675) is William Wycherley’s third and most popular play. From its initial production, audience members differed regarding the extent to which the play’s portrayal of sexuality exceeded the bounds of propriety. While the play remained popular, its bawdiness demanded revision over the course of the eighteenth century in order to be staged, and it continues to be one of the most frequently performed Restoration comedies. With the exception of the prologue, epilogue, and some couplets that conclude particular acts, the play is written entirely in prose. Act 1, scene 1 takes place entirely in the lodgings of Horner, the protagonist of the play, whose name suggests his penchant for making cuckolds of men—giving them horns—by seducing their lovers or wives. Horner is talking with Quack, a physician who, at Horner’s request, has spread the rumor that Horner has suffered a venereal disease and been treated in a way that leaves him impotent ‘‘as a eunuch.’’ Act 1 consists of a series of visits from people who have heard the rumor with varying degrees of conviction and sympathy. At the opening, however, we learn that Horner deliberately seeks the reputation of eunuch in order to gain access to women that he couldn’t have access to before because of his reputation as a notorious rake—defined by Samuel Johnson as ‘‘a man addicted to pleasure.’’ One implication of Horner’s ‘‘new unpracticed trick’’ is that he is more predatory than proud; he doesn’t mind seeing his reputation fall in order to achieve what he considers to be a more worthy goal. First to enter Horner’s lodgings are Sir Jasper Fidget and his wife, Lady Fidget, and his sister, Mrs. Dainty Fidget. Sir Jasper seeks to determine the veracity of

Restoration Drama the rumor regarding Horner’s impotence, delights in his conclusion that it’s true, and taunts Horner by forcing him into familiarity with Lady Fidget. After Sir Jasper and the women leave, Horner explains his logic to Quack. By taking on the reputation of impotence, Horner will provide women of society what they truly want: a way to satisfy their desires without cost to their reputations: ‘‘[Y]our women of honor, as you call ‘em, are only chary of their reputations, not their persons, and ‘tis scandal they would avoid, not men.’’ This attitude is typical of Restoration comedy in which reputation functions like credit; credit has a tenuous connection to actual value and is calculated on history, present situation, and prospects. Moreover, credit affords one the ability to pursue one’s aims without actually paying for the satisfaction. So long as the women of quality in Restoration comedies can maintain the reputation of honor or virtue, they can act in any way they please. The hazard is in the loss of reputation, which would result in a loss of ability to effect one’s ends. Horner’s coup is in ensuring women that they can maintain their reputations despite his company. Moreover, the desire to humiliate Horner that we see in men such as Sir Jasper leads them to force Horner into women’s company, thereby giving Horner more opportunity to seduce women of reputation. The next characters to enter Horner’s lodgings are his friends Harcourt and Dorilant. Horner maintains the deception with them as well by suggesting that among the benefits of impotency is more time for ‘‘lasting, rational, and manly pleasures’’ such as drinking and socializing. Harcourt disagrees, and we see a staple of Restoration comedy in the elaboration of witty similes or analogies. Harcourt goes first: ‘‘[M]istresses are like books. If you pore upon them too much, they doze you and make you unfit for company; but if used discreetly, you are the fitter for conversation by ‘em.’’ Dorilant follows: ‘‘A mistress should be like a little country retreat near the town, not to dwell in constantly, but only for a night and away, to taste the town the better when a man returns.’’ Horner counters that to be ‘‘a good fellow’’ and ‘‘a good friend,’’ one must be neither ‘‘a lover of women’’ nor ‘‘a lover of money.’’ He then offers his friends a dichotomy: choose the ‘‘joy’’ of wine or ‘‘the grief and torments’’ of love. To some extent, Horner falls victim to his own dichotomy in that his pursuit of women of honor will keep him from enjoying the company of his friends, but the initial assertion that to be sociable one must be liberal seems an apt ideal for the Restoration rake. Another visitor, Sparkish, is announced and before he enters, the three men describe him as someone who is full of conceit, who is oblivious to the low opinion that people have of him, who assumes that he is welcome in company when in fact people find him tiresome. Sparkish is objectionable because he pretends to be what he is not. Horner criticizes such men: ‘‘A pox on ‘em, and all that force nature, and would be still what she forbids ‘em! Affectation is her greatest monster.’’ Coming from a man seeking the reputation of eunuch, the line seems ironic;

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Western Drama through the Ages yet Horner is cunning rather than affected. Horner’s observation and the other men’s acquiescence to it support an ethic of nature (a critical term in The Rehearsal as well). This ethic assumes that people have natures that they ought to recognize and with which they should act in accordance; however, the wits subscribe to a kind of elite cynicism by suggesting that most people act in a way that conceals rather than reveals their nature. The observation is cynical because it sees people as largely hypocritical, elitist because it sees society as a meritocracy of wit. Sparkish enters and immediately rallies Horner on his impotency. Sparkish’s attempts at wit are not absurd in the manner of Bayes, but they are often simply not funny. Noting the lack of response by the wits to his raillery, he observes, ‘‘Well, I see one had as good go to law without a witness, as break a jest without a laugher on one’s side.’’ At times, Sparkish will be witty, but usually in ways that are self-incriminating; whether as here (in which case, he exposes that he would consider keeping someone, a ‘‘laugher,’’ nearby to make him appear witty) or in ironic remarks as when he insists on dining with the three gentlemen who are eagerly trying to force him out of the house and so avoid him: ‘‘What, d’ye think I’ll eat then with gay, shallow fops and silent coxcombs? I think wit as necessary at dinner as a glass of good wine, and that’s the reason I never have any stomach when I eat alone.’’ Sparkish inadvertently confesses to having no wit. Pinchwife, a 40-something former acquaintance of the three men and the brother to Sparkish’s fiance´e, enters as soon as Sparkish leaves. He has come to town with his 21-year old bride to attend Sparkish’s wedding to Alithea. In some respects, Pinchwife is the second most important male character in the play. He’s so suspicious of Horner and so determined not to be made a cuckold that he would disguise the fact that he is married. The antagonism between Horner and Pinchwife is palpable in this dialogue, and if the play has heretofore led us to see Horner as grossly predatory, it leads us to see Pinchwife as someone who wants a woman whom he can possess and control. Horner admires women with wit (‘‘I think no young woman ugly that has it, and no handsome woman agreeable without it’’), while Pinchwife would rather have an ignorant and pliable wife. Pinchwife demonstrates two character flaws in his initial appearance: an extremely jealous temperament and overweening confidence in his ability to ‘‘understand the town’’ as he puts it. Both aspects of his character lead him to bring about rather than avoid what he fears. Act 2, scene 1 opens at Pinchwife’s house with a conversation between Margery, Pinchwife’s ‘‘country wife,’’ and Alithea, Pinchwife’s sister. Margery is an interesting character because she allows Wycherley to consider character and environment. On the one hand, the country will stand throughout the play, as it does throughout all Restoration comedies, as the source of things ‘‘rustic’’ and unsophisticated. On the other hand, Margery demonstrates an appetite for the attractions of the town and an aptitude for manipulation. Much of the humor

Restoration Drama surrounding the character of Margery lies in the way that Pinchwife’s efforts to ‘‘keep her in ignorance’’ backfire. As Pinchwife encourages Margery to understand that she should love him rather than any other man, he makes it clear that this is not the town way: ‘‘Ay, my dear, you must love me only, and not be like the naughty town-women, who only hate their husbands and love every man else, love plays, visits, fine coaches, fine clothes, fiddles, balls, treats, and so lead a wicked town-life.’’ Margery immediately responds by expressing a desire for these things, and Alithea notes, ‘‘The fool has forbid me discovering to her the pleasures of the town, and he is now setting her agog upon them himself.’’ Margery confirms this when she tells Pinchwife that his reluctance to allow her to attend a play made her, ‘‘as ‘twere, desire it.’’ Sparkish and Harcourt enter Pinchwife’s house so that Sparkish can introduce Harcourt to Alithea; Pinchwife, upon seeing them, locks Margery in a separate room. Sparkish introduces Harcourt to Alithea, and Harcourt expresses his admiration of her, which provides the central romantic concern of the plot. After Sparkish, Alithea, and Harcourt exit, Lady Fidget, Mrs. Dainty Fidget, and Mrs. Squeamish all appear at Pinchwife’s lodgings in order to meet his wife, and when he can’t persuade them to leave, he leaves himself. After noting Pinchwife’s intense jealousy, the women discuss the difficulties facing women of ‘‘quality.’’ They begin by complaining that married women of ‘‘quality’’ are seldom engaged in extra-marital affairs by men of quality who ‘‘use us with the same indifferency and ill-breeding as if we were all married to ‘em.’’ Worst still, the women note that men of quality spread rumors about having had affairs with women of quality, rumors all the more awful given that they are not true; that is, women of quality both suffer defamation of character and neglect. The Country Wife stands out for the numerous opportunities it takes to satirize the behavior of men through the mouths of its female characters. Although the wits earlier expressed reluctance to marry, the women at this point, and others, express both some dissatisfaction with the married state and also a sense that many men are imposters when it comes to their sexual prowess and intrigues. Act 2 closes with Horner making Lady Fidget understand that he is in fact not impotent but that he has spread the rumor himself in order to shield those with whom he would have intrigues from suspicion or scandal. Lady Fidget responds, ‘‘[C]ould you be so generous, so truly a man of honor, as for the sakes of us women of honor, to cause yourself to be reported no man? No man! And to suffer the greatest shame that could fall upon a man, that none might fall upon us women by your conversation?’’ The remark indicates just how flexible the concept of honor is when it is applied without reference to any ideals but those of pleasure shielded from the world’s prying eyes. After complimenting Horner on his honorable action, Lady Fidget seeks assurance that Horner is in fact not impotent; ever the empiricist, Horner replies, ‘‘I scorn you should take my word; I desire to be

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Western Drama through the Ages tried only, madam.’’ The scene ends with a self-satisfied Sir Jasper leaving Horner with the ladies so that he may attend his own business. As liberality rather than jealousy or economy had been central to the Restoration wit’s code of behavior, so is pleasure rather than business. After Sir Jasper exits, Lady Fidget delivers the act’s closing couplet: ‘‘Who for his business from his wife will run, / Takes the best care to have her business done’’; that is, husbands who elevate business over their obligations to their wives will bear some responsibility in leading their wives into intrigues with other men. Much of act 3 is devoted to Harcourt’s pursuit of Alithea, which is important not only for offering the only glimpse of affection in the play but also for offering insight into yet another way in which romantic love is debased by a society where one’s reputation means everything, and everything affects one’s reputation. It becomes increasingly clear that Sparkish lacks passion for Alithea, although the sign of that failure, his lack of jealousy over Harcourt’s treatment of his fiance´e, is a dubious register given Pinchwife’s actions. Sparkish, like Horner and Pinchwife, uses Alithea as an object or accessory fit for a man who fashions himself fashionable. Alithea argues that Sparkish should be angry with Harcourt for making love to her, but Sparkish hears this as if she’s suggesting that he should be angry with Harcourt for loving her: ‘‘If he did love you, ‘tis but what he can’t help; and ‘tis your fault, not his, if he admires you. I hate a man for being of my opinion! I’ll ne’er do’t, by the world.’’ Alithea recognizes that Sparkish relishes a sign of the approval of wits in his choice for wife: ‘‘Is it for your honor of mine, to suffer a man to make love to me?’’ Sparkish’s reply is not without reason: ‘‘Is it for your honor or mine, to have me jealous? That he makes love to you is a sign you are handsome; and that I am not jealous is a sign that you are virtuous. That, I think, is for your honor.’’ Although Sparkish makes a good point, Alithea has underscored the fact that Sparkish’s trust is one thing, his motives something else; in this case, Sparkish is suffering and forcing Alithea to suffer someone else’s designs—designs that Sparkish cannot discover because he is blinded by his own vanity. In wooing her, Harcourt draws Alithea’s attention to Sparkish’s concern for himself and lack of concern for her: ‘‘[Y]ou may see how the most estimable and most glorious creature in the world is valued by him,’’ he tells Alithea, who explains the comment’s significance to Sparkish: ‘‘[H]e means you care not for me, nor who has me.’’ Sparkish reveals his lack of intelligence, his lack of passion, and also his frustration with women: ‘‘Gad, I see virtue makes a woman as troublesome as a little reading or learning.’’ While Sparkish’s misogyny is less striking because it is neither predatory like Horner’s nor violent like Pinchwife’s, his is the public face of their desire to possess women in secret: ‘‘I love to be envied, and would not marry a wife that I alone could love; loving alone is as dull as eating alone. . . . And to tell you the truth, it may be I love to have rivals in a wife, they make her seem to a man still but as a kept mistress.’’ Sparkish objectifies women in a new

Restoration Drama way, as objects that excite him solely because they stimulate the interest of others yet belong to him. Act 4 deals mainly in the plots of Pinchwife and Horner. In scene 2, we find Pinchwife dictating a letter for Margery to send to Horner as if it were written by her. Over the course of the play, Pinchwife and Horner have brought Horner’s desire for Margery to her attention, and Pinchwife is now trying to assess Margery’s feelings and at the same time curtail any opportunities for Horner to see Margery. When Margery admits that she finds Horner attractive, Pinchwife concludes, ‘‘So, ‘tis plain she loves him, yet she has not love enough to make her conceal it from me; but the sight of him will increase her aversion for me and love for him, and that love instruct her how to deceive me and satisfy him, all idiot as she is. Love! ‘Twas he gave women first their craft, their art of deluding; out of nature’s hands they came plain, open, silly, and fit for slaves, as she and Heaven intended ‘em.’’ The passage demonstrates Pinchwife’s low estimation of women and his conception of wives as slaves by nature. When Margery resists writing the letter as Pinchwife dictates, he reacts violently: ‘‘Write as I bid you, or I will write ‘whore’ with this penknife in your face.’’ When Margery expurgates some words that she contends she should not write since they are ‘‘filthy,’’ Pinchwife again threatens her: ‘‘I will stab out those eyes that cause my mischief.’’ Despite Pinchwife’s threats, Margery does deceive him by writing a second letter in which she divulges her husband’s plot; moreover, she gets her husband to deliver that letter to Horner rather than the one he had dictated to her. Act 4, scene 3 opens in Horner’s lodgings as he explains to Quack the success that he has had in gaining access to women of honor, enjoying ‘‘particular privileges,’’ and witnessing their lack of honor and hypocrisy. Quack expresses some doubt and hides behind a screen when Lady Fidget enters. The dialogue that ensues demonstrates the way in which Restoration comedies made euphemisms out of concepts: Lady Fidget:

Well, Horner, am not I a woman of honor? You see I’m as good as my word.

Horner: And you shall see, madam, I’ll not be behindhand with you in honor; and I’ll be as good as my word too, if you please but to withdraw into the next room. Lady Fidget:

But first, my dear sir, you must promise to have a care of my dear honor.

Lady Fidget expresses concern that her behavior, while not being divulged by Horner himself, will be suspected or become the object of rumor from her acquaintances who are jealous of her honor: Lady Fidget: [Y]ou must have great care of your conduct; for my acquaintances are so censorious (oh, ‘it’s a wicked, censorious world, Mr. Horner!), I say, are so censorious and detracting that perhaps they’ll talk, to the prejudice of my honor, though you should not let them know the dear secret.

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Western Drama through the Ages Horner: Nay, madam, rather than they shall prejudice your honor, I’ll prejudice theirs; and to serve you, I’ll lie with ‘em all, make the secret their own, and then they’ll keep it. I am a Machiavel in love, madam. Lady Fidget: Horner:

Oh, no, sir, not that way.

Nay, the devil take me if censorious women are to be silenced any other way.

Lady Fidget: A secret is better kept, I hope, by a single person than a multitude; therefore pray do not trust anybody else with it, dear, dear, Mr. Horner.

Not only does honor consist in reputation rather than behavior, but honor is best protected by lowering the behavior of others than raising one’s own. Horner’s means to protect Lady Fidget’s honor sparks her jealousy and reveals her desire to possess him. The degree to which Horner is able to orchestrate the intrigue and cuckold the husband is demonstrated through Sir Jasper Fidget’s entrance. In this part of the scene, we shift from ‘‘honor’’ as a euphemism for sex to a double entendre involving ‘‘china.’’ Lady Fidget claims that she came to get Horner to help her shop for china: ‘‘I was fain to come up to fetch him, or go without him, which I was resolved not to do; for he knows china very well, and has himself very good, but will not let me see it lest I should beg some. But I will find it out, and have what I came for yet.’’ With this remark, Lady Fidget locks herself in a different room of the house ostensibly to search Horner’s china. More double entendres tumble forth. First, Horner tells Sir Jasper to remain where he is, and that Horner will ‘‘get in to her [Lady Fidget] the back way.’’ Sir Jasper warns his wife, ‘‘My Lady Fidget! Wife! He is coming in to you the back way.’’ Lady Fidget replies, ‘‘Let him come, and welcome, which way he will.’’ Mrs. Squeamish enters and tries desperately to find Horner and Lady Fidget less out of concern for Lady Fidget’s welfare and more out of desire to obtain some china herself as we discover when the characters return with Lady Fidget holding a piece of china: Lady Fidget: Horner:

And I have been toiling and moiling for the prettiest piece of china, my dear.

Nay, she has been too hard for me, do what I could.

Mrs. Squeamish: O Lord, I’ll have some china too. Good Mr. Horner, don’t think to give other people china, and me none; come in with me too. Horner:

Upon my honor, I have none left now.

Mrs. Squeamish: Nay, Nay, I have known you deny your china before now, but you shan’t put me off so. Come. Horner:

This lady had the last there.

Lady Fidget:

Yes, indeed, madam, to my certain knowledge he has no more left.

Mrs. Squeamish:

Oh, but it may be he may have some you could not find.

Restoration Drama Lady Fidget:

What, d’ye think if he had had any left, I would not have had it too? For we

women of quality never think we have china enough.

Sir Jasper is oblivious to the desires of Lady Fidget and Mrs. Squeamish and the ways in which he abets Horner. Moreover, the scene demonstrates that honor is a disguise, cloak, or mask under which women of quality disguise their desires, through which they try to satisfy them, and by which they try to outvie their peers. Act 5 opens with Pinchwife delivering Margery, disguised as Alithea, to Horner. Margery has deceived Pinchwife into believing that Alithea is in love with Horner and that Margery is Alithea. After leaving his wife in his rival’s hands, Pinchwife informs Sparkish that Alithea has jilted him and will be married to Horner. When Alithea appears, Sparkish berates her for her treachery and spitefully resigns his claim to her. Alithea, who has no idea what Sparkish is talking about, can now admit her affection for Harcourt with a clear conscience. By the time we return to Horner’s lodgings in scene 4, he has enjoyed his intrigue with Margery but not managed to sneak her out before the women of quality arrive for a masquerade and banquet. At the masquerade, the women reiterate their resentment toward their husbands and men in general. Upon inquiry, Horner admits to having avoided women of quality because of their concern for their reputations: Lady Fidget:

Our reputation! Lord, why should you not think that we women make use of

our reputation, as you men of yours, only to deceive the world with less suspicion? Our virtue is like the statesman’s religion, the Quaker’s word, the gamester’s oath, and the great man’s honor—but to cheat those that trust us. Mrs. Squeamish:

And that demureness, coyness, and modesty that you see in our faces in

the boxes at plays, is as much a sign of a kind woman as a vizard-mask in the pit. Mrs. Dainty Fidget:

For, I assure you, women are least masked when they have the velvet

vizard on. Lady Fidget:

You would have found us modest women in our denials only.

By the time The Country Wife was written, ‘‘vizard’’ in the pit of the playhouse had become synonymous with prostitute. The dialogue clearly undercuts any notion of feminine modesty as an inherent value; rather, it’s a value worn by those women of quality who can afford it. Horner asks why the elaborate deception and maintenance of honor, and Lady Fidget answers that it is a matter of gaining a kind of liberty that lets women of quality avoid those whom they dislike and ‘‘enjoy the better and more privately those you love.’’ One of the interesting aspects of this dialogue is that it portrays some women as sharing in the predatory and possessive impulses that characterize people such as Horner and Pinchwife. Unfortunately for these women, as they continue to drink, they come to confess their lovers, all of which it turns out to be one and the same man—Horner:

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Western Drama through the Ages Lady Fidget:

Well then, there’s no remedy; sister sharers, let us not fall out, but have a

care of our honor. Though we get no presents, no jewels of him, we are savers of our honor, the jewel of most value and use, which shines yet to the world unsuspected, though it be counterfeit. Horner:

Nay, and is e’en as good as if it were true, provided the world think so; for honor,

like beauty now, only depends on the opinion of others.

Horner’s consolation reiterates the extent to which concepts depend upon conventions for their reference. Neither honor nor beauty corresponds to anything in particular; rather they depend entirely on what people believe. The beautiful are not beautiful in light of admired features of face or figure, but due to the fact that people regard them as beautiful whatever those people’s reasons and whatever that person’s appearance may be. Shortly after the revelation at the banquet, almost all the other characters arrive at Horner’s lodgings. Convinced that Alithea wants to marry Horner and that he brought Alithea to Horner earlier, Pinchwife threatens to make Horner to marry Alithea. Harcourt offers to stand in Horner’s place, and Horner resigns his right to marry Alithea to Harcourt, but Pinchwife refuses to recognize this act. As Pinchwife grabs his sword, Margery, fearing for Horner and still wearing Alithea’s clothes, enters and asks that the parson marry her to Horner. As an irate Pinchwife prepares to kill his wife, Horner steps in, and Pinchwife prepares to kill them both. Ultimately, Horner begs Quack to inform Pinchwife of his condition and to save both his own and the ladies’ reputations from the ‘‘censorious world.’’ Sir Jasper believes Quack readily, but Pinchwife is reluctant. The women, Margery included, maintain the deception, and the party ends with a warning to husbands not to constrain their wives lest they bring to pass what they most fear by making them desperate. Pinchwife and Horner are the characters given lines at the end of the play. Pinchwife wishes both that he could believe that he had not been cuckolded and also that he had not married a silly woman. Horner notes that while ‘‘[v]ain fops’’ vie for the reputation of ladies’ man, the one who would truly be so must lose the esteem of most men, such as Horner has done—the predator’s paradox, it seems. If the epilogue of the play is intended to underscore its message, it is interesting to note that little is said of Horner. Instead the epilogue, spoken by Lady Fidget, directs the satire at two types of men: the Sparkish types, who would be taken as rakes but are in fact frightened when they encounter libidinous women, and elderly men who cast themselves as rakes but really support mistresses whose company other men enjoy. The epilogue ends by noting that while men may boast of intrigues and thereby raise their reputations with their fellows, they will be required to prove themselves to women, who will not be deceived by mere reputation. To that extent, the play promotes a kind of libidinous realism that contests with the world of show constructed by and for men.

Restoration Drama

JEREMY COLLIER AND THE DIRECTION OF DRAMA Like heroic drama and dramatic satire, Restoration comedies do not realistically depict Restoration society on stage but offer exaggerations of society for the comedy’s own satirical ends. Yet, in order to be effective, satire requires an audience that understands it and willingly submits to authorial control. Yet as the seventeenth century wound to a close, comic dramatists, who had found a mixed response to begin with, found a very vocal critic. Jeremy Collier was a nonjuror, meaning that he was an Anglican divine who refused to take the oath of allegiance to King William and Queen Mary after the forced exile of James II in 1688. This position explains some of Collier’s conservative views, but it does not explain the extent to which his opinions found sympathetic ears. That might best be explained by the fact that despite his vehemence Collier makes interesting points that remain relevant. He experienced the plays he wrote about as literary texts rather than performances, and his opinions were those of a moral critic rather than a dramatic or literary critic. The distinction rests both on method and on the kinds of observations that one makes. Rather than plumb dramas for subtleties, Collier assumed that what was performed affected the way in which people behaved, and he argued the deleterious effects of libertine playwrights. In that sense, Collier is an appropriate note to close on given that each of the plays we have considered has dealt with the ideals that inform human behavior and the ways in which those ideals or behavior are (mis)represented on stage. In the introduction to his A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, Collier offered the following definition of drama: ‘‘The business of plays is to recommend virtue and discountenance vice; to show the uncertainty of human greatness, the sudden turns of fate, and the unhappy conclusions of violence and injustice; ‘tis to expose the singularities of pride and fancy, to make folly and falsehood contemptible, and to bring everything that is ill under infamy and neglect.’’ The most significant aspect of Collier’s definition is his insistence that the play be clear in its message. Collier thought that English dramatists were talented, but he claimed that they employed their talents to the detriment of the populace rather than the betterment; he referred to them as ‘‘the enemy.’’ Collier criticizes Wycherley in particular in his chapter on ‘‘The Immodesty of the Stage’’ for Wycherley’s characters of Margery Pinchwife, Horner, and Lady Fidget. As the title of the chapter implies, Collier makes some assumptions about the Restoration audience that The Country Wife calls into question. He claims that Restoration comedy is only suitable for those who lack a sense of ‘‘honor,’’ without considering the questions that the comedies raise about concepts such as honor. Honor is not the only term that explicitly echoes The Country Wife. Collier objects that the language in Restoration comedies is offensive: ‘‘Obscenity in any company is a rustic, uncreditable talent, but among women ‘tis particularly rude. Such talk would be very affrontive in conversation and not endured by any lady of

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Western Drama through the Ages reputation.’’ Collier argues that to imagine that what women would avoid in conversation is fit for them at the theater is ‘‘to abuse them.’’ The abuse is not solely a matter of subjecting the female members of the audience to what they might not wish to hear, but it also rests in his conclusion that female characters are made to speak the language and sentiments appropriate to prostitutes rather than women in general, who are characterized by ‘‘native modesty.’’ As noted in connection with his definition for the purpose of a play, Collier focuses on the way in which playwrights treat vice. In his chapter ‘‘The StagePoets Make Their Principal Persons Vicious and Reward Them at the End of the Play,’’ he claims that the distinction between virtue and vice is clear in nature and argues that dramatists ‘‘endeavor to blot the distinctions, to rub out the colors or change the marks.’’ Dramatists present vice to the audience’s understanding in such a way that it is appealing rather than appalling: ‘‘To put lewdness into a thriving condition, to give it an equipage of quality, and to treat it with ceremony and respect is the way to confound the understanding, to fortify the charm, and to make the mischief invincible.’’ Wycherley’s characters of Horner and Harcourt are noted as vicious characters who are rewarded in the end. Collier concludes, ‘‘A fine gentleman is a fine whoring, swearing, smutty, atheistical man. These qualifications, it seems, complete the idea of honor. They are the top improvements of fortune and the distinguishing glories of birth and breeding!’’ Collier argues that the lack of positive examples in Restoration comedies indicates that comic dramatists are so consumed with satirizing their age that they see all in a jaundiced light and leave no ideal untainted: ‘‘The stage seldom gives quarter to any thing that’s serviceable or significant, but persecutes worth and goodness under every appearance. He that would be safe from their satire must take care to disguise himself in vice and hang out the colors of debauchery.’’ The last remark is particularly interesting as the inverse of the situation faced by Lady Fidget and women of quality in The Country Wife. Collier’s objections, despite their lack of analytical support, raise interesting questions about the satire in Restoration comedy. He asks, ‘‘Is dissolution of manners such a peccadillo?’’ Later he turns to the means and ends of satire in his castigation of what comedy lacks: ‘‘To laugh without reason is the pleasure of fools, and against it, of something worse. The exposing of knavery and making lewdness ridiculous is a much better occasion for laughter. And this I take to be the end of comedy. And therefore it does not differ from tragedy in the end, but in the means. Instruction is the principal design of both. The one works by terror, the other by infamy.’’ The point that Collier raises has to do with the responsibility of the dramatist. His charge seems to be that Restoration dramatists have, like Sparkish, become vain; they seek to entertain through ingenious displays of wit and fashionable satire, but they fail to press the advantage of the stage by making their audience clearly aware of folly and vice.

Restoration Drama Collier’s attack did not go unchallenged. The late seventeenth and early eighteenth century critic, John Dennis, replied in The Usefulness of the Stage (1698) by blaming the lewdness of the Restoration stage on both the suppression of drama during the Interregnum and the influence of the Charles II’s court, which had ‘‘united the spirit of French whoring to the fury of Dutch drinking’’ during their exile. Of course, neither argument challenges the contention that Restoration comedies were lewd. Restoration playwright William Congreve also replied to Collier’s attack in Amendments to Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations (1698). Congreve makes several interesting points. He suggests in Collier’s examples of licentious passages tell us more about Collier’s mind than the dramas themselves; that is, Congreve accuses Collier of reading his own licentiousness into the plays. He also accuses Collier of duplicity by reading passages in a way that discredits them but not in the way in which they were intended to be read. Taking issue with Collier’s conception of comedy’s purpose, Congreve argues that comedy is a genre with a particular subject: the follies of people, whether common or quality. Comedy doesn’t deal with the horrible but with vices that many might demonstrate, and it attempts to get its audience to laugh at those vices. To argue, as Collier does, that tragedy and comedy have the same ends but different means is to confuse two distinct forms of drama. Lastly, Congreve claims that one cannot impute to the dramatist the views held by his or her characters. Simply because a comic dramatist represents vicious characters, we do not have reason to believe that the poet is him or herself of such character. Although Congreve made good points, Collier’s concern over the relationship between artist, art, and audience was not easily settled. Congreve wrote only one more comedy before giving up drama. After 1700, comedies became much more sentimental with clearer distinctions between vice and virtue. Despite their vehemence, Collier’s criticisms found support in the ‘‘censorious world’’ of late Restoration England.

FURTHER READING Canfield, J. Douglas and Maja-Lisa von Sneidern Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century Drama. Toronto, Canada: Broadview Press, 2001. Fisk, Deborah Payne Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hume, Robert The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1976. Owen, Susan Companion to Restoration Drama. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2001.

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PART III

National and Regional Theater


Modern Canadian Theater Jerry Wasserman

BEGINNINGS Modern drama in Canada begins around the turn of the twentieth century, although Canada’s fascinating theatrical history reaches back beyond the previous millennium in the ritual performances of its aboriginal inhabitants. Ironically, many of those highly developed forms—native dance, the potlatch, and other ceremonials—were banned at the time modern drama took root in Canada, part of an attempt to assimilate the ‘‘dying race’’ of aboriginal peoples. Canadian plays by European settlers date from as early as 1606 when Marc Lescarbot wrote Le The´ aˆtre de Neptune en la Nouvelle-France and staged it in Indian canoes to honour the arrival of French dignitaries at Port Royal, Acadia. Playwriting in English Canada goes back to the eighteenth century, and nineteenth century Canadian playhouses sprang up in substantial numbers, mainly to accommodate American and British touring companies. The first half of the twentieth century saw the development of a thriving amateur theater movement and the best radio drama on the continent. But Canadian theater as an indigenous professional institution dates only as far back as the end of World War II. And English-Canadian drama, in the sense of a body of dramatic work by Canadian playwrights written for performance in professional theaters, is an even more recent development. Modern French drama in Quebec had its inception with Gratien Ge´linas’s Tit-Coq in 1948, a wartime Montreal love story about an alienated young man who desires to belong. For English Canada the key date was 1967: the year of Canada’s Centennial and Montreal’s Expo ‘67. As part of the Centennial celebrations, new Canadian plays were given professional productions from coast to

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Western Drama through the Ages coast, including George Ryga’s seminal The Ecstasy of Rita Joe. This was a new cultural phenomenon for a nation buoyed by national self-consciousness and pride—plays by Canadian playwrights, performed in Canadian theaters or international centers like New York, where Toronto’s John Herbert had a major hit with Fortune and Men’s Eyes. The subsequent expansion of Canadian drama was the product of a particular historical moment, like the new European theater that appeared in the 1870s or the new American theater of the 1920s. Like those movements, the Canadian theatrical revolution of 1967 was rooted in an evolution of social and cultural forces that had been gathering momentum for many years. Alan Filewood notes that the Canadian stage at the turn of the century was ‘‘a branch-plant extension of the novel American discovery that if theatre was business, then it could be big business.. . .By 1910 almost every playhouse in Canada was owned directly [by] or contractually locked into the American theatrical syndicates.’’ The syndicates offered Canadian playgoers a predictable commercial product delivered by imported talent—American plays with American players. As an alternative to the Americanism with which Canadians attached to the British Empire felt uncomfortable, Canada’s theatrical pioneers turned to trans-Atlantic models. In the first decade of the century, inspired by the vogue of European art theaters, Toronto’s Arts and Letters Club Players performed contemporary works from the world repertoire. They especially admired the Irish Abbey Theatre which would be cited time and again as a model for Canadians. In 1919, industrialist and future cultural mandarin Vincent Massey founded Hart House Theatre in Toronto, dedicated to doing plays which would otherwise have gone unproduced there, including plays by Canadians. Enough such plays were written to fill two modest volumes of Canadian Plays from Hart House Theatre by 1927. The most interesting of the Hart House playwrights was Merrill Denison. His published collection, The Unheroic North (1923), which included the popular satirical comedy Brothers in Arms, established him as Canada’s first playwright of note. Unable to make a living writing for the stage in Canada, Denison moved to the United States in 1931 to write for American radio.

THE 1920S AND 1930S Throughout the 1920s and 1930s amateur theater flourished under the umbrella of the Little Theatre movement. In 1932 the Dominion Drama Festival (DDF) was established to consolidate the activities of Canadian Little Theatres and upgrade the quality of Canada’s theatrical arts and crafts through competition and cross-fertilization. A nationwide competition chaired by Vincent Massey, the Festival featured an annual series of regional playoffs climaxing in a national final at which awards were given for production and performance. Community

Modern Canadian Theater theaters, school and university drama groups, and established amateur companies such as Hart House were eligible, with theater professionals adjudicating, providing critiques and determining winners. From 1933 to 1970, with a hiatus during the war, the DDF helped institutionalize amateur theater in Canada. It provided a proving ground for Canadian talent, and through trophies and cash prizes it encouraged the writing and production of Canadian plays. In 1934 the Festival organizers could come up with just nine Canadian titles for inclusion on a list of suggested plays sent to participating groups; by 1966 the list contained 240 Canadian titles. But the quality and adventurousness of the work the Festival inspired were often questionable. As late as 1967, the DDF refused to allow Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs—fifteen unhappy women speaking colloquial, Que´bequois French—to be produced as part of its all-Canadian celebrations. Earlier, the DDF had frowned on the multi-media expressionism of Herman Voaden’s plays. Voaden was an ardent nationalist and theatrical innovator who desired a Canadian dramatic art as distinctive as the paintings of the Group of Seven. To that end he sponsored a playwriting competition in Toronto in 1929 which suggested that each play be set in the Canadian North and its mood be based on the writer’s favorite Canadian painting. Voaden’s own work combined the Canadian landscape with techniques drawn from modern dance, Wagnerian opera, and symbolist drama to create a form he called ‘‘symphonic expressionism’’ in plays with titles like Rocks and Earth Song. Also in Toronto a group of women journalists organized the Playwrights’ Studio Group in 1932 and produced more than fifty new plays in the decade, mainly society comedies. At the other end of the spectrum were the Progressive Arts Clubs in Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg and Vancouver, leftist workers’ theater groups that created and performed agitprop social protest plays throughout the Depression years. In Alberta the Banff School of the Theatre was founded in 1933, later evolving into the Banff School of Fine Arts, still an important training center. An alumnus and later instructor at Banff was Gwen Pharis Ringwood, whose stark prairie tragedies Still Stands the House and Dark Harvest were among the strongest Canadian plays of the era.

THE 1940S AND 1950S A significant development for Canadian drama was the rise of radio. What came to be known as ‘‘The Golden Age’’ of Canadian radio began when Andrew Allan became Supervisor of Drama for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and producer of its weekly Stage series. From 1944 to 1955 Stage and Wednesday Night created consistently bold, imaginative, and broadly popular drama that maintained high standards of excellence. The writers and actors that

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Western Drama through the Ages Allan assembled—and paid for their work—comprised ‘‘far and away the most exciting repertory group that can be heard,’’ The New York Times suggested in 1946, and it became Canada’s equivalent of a national professional theater. Hundreds of original scripts by Allan’s house writers such as Lister Sinclair and Len Peterson were produced for broadcast. In spite of the varied successes of the DDF and the CBC, neither amateur theatricals nor radio drama could satisfy the need for a vibrant, professional stage culture. John Coulter, who became an award-winning DDF playwright and a frequently produced CBC dramatist after emigrating from Ireland in 1936, was a vocal critic of Canadian theater. He proposed Dublin’s Abbey as a model for Canadians, a theater ‘‘showing the Irish to themselves . . .Irish mugs in Irish mirrors.’’ Canadians too, he argued, could find dramatic subject matter in indigenous situations. After a series of plays set in Ireland, Coulter himself turned to Canadian history, achieving great success with a series of plays about Me´tis rebel leader Louis Riel. First produced in 1950, Riel would serve as a paradigm for later Canadian history plays: revisionist history with the rebel as hero, presented as a synthesis of documentary and myth. Riel was produced by the New Play Society, a professional company founded in Toronto by Dora Mavor Moore, the first Canadian actor to attend RADA. From 1946 to 1950, the Society’s full seasons of plays in the Royal Ontario Museum Theatre proved to many skeptics the viability of a professional Canadian stage. In 1954 Toronto got a second homegrown professional theater, the Crest, which presented quality work in repertory until 1966. Its major Canadian playwright was Robertson Davies, whose A Jig for the Gypsy and Hunting Stuart premiered there in 1954 and 1955. Davies had become English Canada’s foremost amateur dramatist with plays such as Eros at Breakfast and Fortune, My Foe in 1948 and 1949, satires of Canadian philistinism and what he considered the national disease, ‘‘emotional understimulation.’’ He remained a significant force in Canadian theater until the mid-1960s when his playwriting career gave way to his work as a novelist. Davies’s journalism also contributed to the developing Canadian theater. Under the pseudonym Samuel Marchbanks he protested the conditions under which Canadian theater workers had to labor—what he called in 1952 ‘‘the seedy amateurism which has afflicted the arts here for so long.’’ Consequently, he reacted with enthusiasm to the idea of a world-class Shakespearean summer theater in Stratford, Ontario. Along with Dora Mavor Moore and Festival organizer Tom Patterson, he helped arrange for British producer-director Tyrone Guthrie to head the venture, which held its first season of two plays under a tent in 1953. Guthrie imported stars Alec Guinness and Irene Worth to play the leads and fleshed out the company with Canadian actors, a policy that remained standard for Stratford well into the 1980s.

Modern Canadian Theater

Stratford Festival The Stratford Festival became an event of international importance and influence, with its new thrust stage designed by Guthrie and Tanya Moiseiwitsch. It raised the profile of theater in Canada and served as a focus of national cultural pride. Stratford also became a training ground for many of the best Canadian actors of the next three decades, making stars of Christopher Plummer, Frances Hyland, and others. But the Festival did little to support the development of Canadian playwriting. Many saw it as a cultural dinosaur, devouring large subsidies at the expense of smaller theaters whose productions of Canadian plays, often on shoestring budgets, were more central to an emerging national drama than was a theater devoted to Shakespeare. Today, Stratford is an economic behemoth, with four stages and multi-million dollar revenues, a Canadian artistic director and a fully Canadian contingent of actors, directors, and designers. The success of Stratford and the other new professional theaters was augmented by the establishment of the Canada Council in 1957, which changed the nature of theater in Canada more than any other single development, providing a massive influx of government funding for buildings, companies, and individuals engaged in the arts. It was the most concrete manifestation of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences appointed by Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent in 1949 with Vincent Massey as chairman. Its mandate was to examine how government could contribute to the development of those areas of endeavour ‘‘which express national feeling, promote common understanding and add to the variety and richness of Canadian life.’’ Its 1951 Report found that Canadian culture was being stifled by a lack of support and facilities and the omnipresence of American influences. Its major recommendation was the formation of the Canada Council for the Encouragement of the Arts, Letters, Humanities and Social Sciences to fund Canadian culture at home and abroad.

THE 1960S AND 1970S Regional Theaters With Canada Council support, a network of regional professional theaters spread across the country. Beginning with Winnipeg’s Manitoba Theatre Centre (MTC) in 1958, each was meant to serve as the focus of theatrical activity in its larger community. Vancouver’s Playhouse and Halifax’s Neptune were established in 1963, Edmonton’s Citadel in 1965, and Regina’s Globe in 1966. By 1970 Montreal, Calgary, Fredericton, and Toronto also had theaters catering to regional communities. In addition, to train actors the National Theatre School opened in Montreal in 1960 with separate French and English programs.

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Western Drama through the Ages At Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, the Shaw Festival began operation in 1962, and Prince Edward Island’s Charlottetown Festival was inaugurated in 1964, specializing in Canadian musical theater. In 1969 and 1970 the completion of three major Centennial construction projects—Ottawa’s National Arts Centre, Toronto’s St. Lawrence Centre, and a new building for the MTC—rounded out a decade of extraordinary growth for the Canadian theater.

‘‘New’’ Drama With the superstructure intact, where were the plays that might crystallize the new drama in English Canada? One of the first to do so was George Ryga’s The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, in which a young Native woman and her boyfriend are destroyed by the white city where they have come to try to improve their lives. It premiered at the Vancouver Playhouse in 1967 in a landmark production remounted for the opening of the National Arts Centre in 1969, when it also aired on national television. Critic Jamie Portman explains that ‘‘Rita Joe happened during Centennial year when Canadians were anxious to look at themselves. But the look that this play provided was an unsettling one. It punctured the euphoria and the smug complacency of Canada’s birthday celebrations and declared unequivocally that all was not well with this country and its institutions.’’ Its implications for Canadian playwriting were equally dramatic: ‘‘This was an indigenous Canadian drama that surfaced and succeeded at a time when indigenous Canadian drama was generally considered to be an aberration.’’ Yet the battle for credibility was not so easily won. The struggles of a halfcentury had resulted in a Canadian theater that by the late 1960s had already largely become entrenched and conservative. The big subsidized theaters mostly tried to emulate Broadway and London’s West End. With few exceptions the regionals served up homogenized theater: safe, commercial seasons of British and American hits plus a smattering of world classics. But the Canadian Centennial happened to coincide with the most radical cultural upheaval of the century in the Western world: sexual and musical revolutions; long hair, peace marches and a Summer of Love. By 1968 in Chicago, Paris, and Prague the revolution would spill over into the streets. Neither Canada nor its theater could remain immune to these forces. That the most significant Canadian plays of the decade appeared in 1967 and 1968 was not coincidental. The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, Fortune and Men’s Eyes, and Les Belles-Soeurs are very much of their age, marked by strong social consciousness and critical anti-establishment perspectives. Herbert and Tremblay were gay, and all three playwrights were outspoken in their social, artistic, and political views. Neither Herbert nor Ryga was initially allowed entry into the United States to see their own plays in production.

Modern Canadian Theater

Modern Canadian Drama Modern Canadian drama was born out of an amalgam of the new consciousness of the age—social, political, and aesthetic—with the new Canadian self-consciousness. Since the larger theaters were generally unsympathetic and unaccommodating to both these forces, a newer Canadian theater had to be invented, an alternate theater. One of its prime movers in Toronto was Martin Kinch, who describes those heady days as having little to do with nationalism: ‘‘The real influences were Fritz Perls and Timothy Leary, Peter Brook and Jerzy Grotowski, Tom O’Horgan, Cafe´ La Mama, Julian Beck, Judith Malina, and the ensemble of the Living Theatre; in short, a host of European and American artists, most of them primarily dedicated to the ethic and the aesthetic of ‘doing your own thing.’’’ In 1969 Kinch became codirector of Toronto’s Theatre Passe Muraille, founded the previous year by Jim Garrard as a theater without walls: neither the traditional fourth wall between actors and audience nor necessarily even the walls of a theater building. A milestone for the new movement was Passe Muraille’s production of Rochelle Owen’s Futz in 1969. In style and content it established the parameters of the alternate theater’s self-conscious anti-conventionality. The sex, obscenity, and nudity it featured would become almost obligatory. When the show was closed by the morality squad and the company charged, the new movement had its red badge of courage. By the summer of 1970 alternate theater in Toronto had undergone a shift from sensationalism to nationalism. Central to the new emphasis were Ken Gass and his Factory Theatre Lab, and the new artistic director of Theatre Passe Muraille, Paul Thompson. Gass set out to prove that Canadian playwrights were just waiting to be discovered and encouraged. His theater would be both a factory and a laboratory, presenting new works, works-in-progress, and staged ideas. Most importantly it would be ‘‘The Home of the Canadian Playwright.’’ His concept paid off with a string of notable new plays by David Freeman, Herschel Hardin, George Walker, and others. Gass remained artistic director of the Factory until 1979, then returned again in 1996 to save the company from imminent demise. Paul Thompson steered Passe Muraille towards a focus on local subject matter and collective creation, involving his actors in firsthand research and improvisation, utilizing their particular skills as key elements in the play. When Thompson took over Passe Muraille, Toronto had some precedent for this kind of theater. George Luscombe had worked with Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop in the mid-1950s and had founded Toronto Workshop Productions in 1959 based on Littlewood’s political and stylistic principles. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the Toronto Workshop Productions created potent socio-political theater with agitprop pieces like Mister Bones and Chicago ‘70 on race and politics in America,

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Western Drama through the Ages and its bittersweet evocation of the Canadian Depression, Ten Lost Years. The partnership of Luscombe and Toronto Workshop Productions lasted for thirty years. But Passe Muraille under Paul Thompson became the most important theater in Canada in the 1970s. Creations like The Farm Show (first performed in a barn) and The Adventures of an Immigrant (performed on Toronto streetcars) made stirring theatrical poetry out of material that was sometimes mundane and always local. Docudrama with a high degree of theatricality became the Passe Muraille trademark: a small company of actors using little but their own bodies and voices to create ingenious stage metaphors. They inspired countless imitators across the country, including the highly successful Paper Wheat, about the co-op movement on the Saskatchewan prairies. The company specialized in popularizing and often mythicizing Canadian history in collective scripts or in conjunction with a writer. Buffalo Jump with Carol Bolt, 1837: The Farmers’ Revolt with Rick Salutin, and Far as the Eye Can See with Rudy Wiebe were some of the best collaborations. Later in the decade Passe Muraille alumni John Gray and Eric Peterson would have international success with Billy Bishop Goes to War, their pocket musical about Canada’s World War I flying ace, as would Linda Griffiths with her solo play about the Trudeaus, Maggie & Pierre. Perhaps the most exciting Canadian playwright to emerge in the 1980s, Judith Thompson, also came out of Passe Muraille with her extraordinary first play, The Crackwalker. Passe Muraille remains to the present day a primary locus of Canadian theatrical production and development.

Theater Outside of Toronto Not everything happened in Toronto. A group of Vancouver university graduates formed Tamahnous Theatre in 1971, a collective that would remain the west coast’s most original and progressive company for the next decade, producing Billy Bishop and premiering Morris Panych with his ‘‘post-nuclear cabaret,’’ Last Call! Vancouver’s New Play Centre came into being in 1970 dedicated to developing new scripts by local writers, and under the direction of Pamela Hawthorn until 1989 it had a hand in most of the drama from the Pacific coast, including the work of Sharon Pollock, Margaret Hollingsworth, Tom Walmsley, John Lazarus, Sheldon Rosen, and Betty Lambert. Seeded by government grants from Local Initiatives Programs (LIP) and Opportunities for Youth, new companies doing indigenous theater sprouted everywhere in 1971 and 1972: Edmonton’s Theatre 3, Calgary’s Alberta Theatre Projects, Pier One in Halifax, CODCO, and the Mummers Troupe in St. John’s. Festival Lennoxville in Quebec presented all-Canadian summer seasons of plays from 1972 until 1982.

Modern Canadian Theater Most of the action was in Toronto, though, and nothing did more to cement its position at the center of the new movement than Tarragon Theatre. Founded in 1971 by Bill Glassco, who had directed Creeps, David Freeman’s angry play about cerebral palsied young men, at the Factory Lab earlier that year, Tarragon opened with a revised version of Creeps. Its first season ended with a new work which was to become the most influential Canadian play of the 1970s, David French’s Leaving Home. Its story of generational conflict and a singularly Canadian form of immigrant alienation (ex-Newfoundlanders spiritually adrift in Toronto) elicited strong audience identification, and its accessible style had a broad appeal. Tarragon also introduced English Canada to the plays of Michel Tremblay with Glassco as co-translator. And from 1973 to 1975 Tarragon produced James Reaney’s Donnellys trilogy, highly theatrical plays about a notorious nineteenth century Ontario family and their murder by vigilantes that many people considered the best work created in the Canadian theater to that time. Combining artistic and commercial success, Tarragon succeeded in bringing Canadian drama into the mainstream under both Glassco, until 1985, and his successor, Urjo Kareda, into the next century. The wave of new alternate theaters in Toronto crested in 1972 with the founding of Toronto Free Theatre by Tom Hendry, Martin Kinch, and John Palmer. Subsidized by LIP grants, its performances were literally free until 1974. Toronto Free’s cultivation of excellent ensemble work and a taste for the psychologically bizarre in scripts and production remained constant until its merger with Centrestage in 1988 to create the Canadian Stage Company. Notwithstanding the dynamism of the alternate theaters, Canadian plays were mostly relegated to small, low-budget theaters that lacked the financial and technical resources available to the heavily subsidized festivals and regionals. To remedy this situation a group of playwrights met in 1971 to recommend a 50 percent Canadian content quota for all theaters receiving government funding. Though no formal quota system was adopted, the controversy led to an informal policy decision by the Canada Council to lean on its client theaters to do more Canadian plays. The results were startling. By the 1972–73 season nearly 50 percent of the plays produced by subsidized theaters in both English and French were Canadian. Regional theaters began commissioning new plays by local playwrights. Significant new work came from Sharon Pollock for the Vancouver Playhouse and Theatre Calgary, John Murrell and W.O. Mitchell also for Theatre Calgary, Ken Mitchell and Rex Deverell for Regina’s Globe, and David Fennario for the Centaur in Montreal. Ontario’s Blyth and Kawartha Summer Festivals proved the value of a homegrown product in their cultivation of Anne Chislett. In each of these cases plays written specifically for local audiences made their way into theaters across the country.

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Western Drama through the Ages The organizational infrastructure of Canadian theater was strengthened in 1976 by the separation of Canadian Actors’ Equity Association from American Equity and the formation of the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT) and the Association for Canadian Theatre History, a national academic organization. Over the next decade companies like Passe Muraille, Tarragon, and Factory Theatre (minus the ‘‘Lab’’) along with the resurgent regionals and successful middle-of-the-road theaters like Vancouver’s Arts Club continued to provide a springboard for Canadian plays. Across the country a new generation of neo-alternates arose: Prairie Theatre Exchange in Winnipeg, Rising Tide Theatre in St. John’s, and Nova Scotia’s Mulgrave Road Co-op and Ship’s Company. Nakai Theatre Ensemble in Whitehorse and Tunooniq in the Arctic ensured the exposure of lively theatrical voices in the Canadian North. In Vancouver Touchstone joined the scene along with Green Thumb, which set the pattern for hard-hitting theater for young audiences. In Edmonton, Theatre Network, Northern Light, Catalyst, Workshop West and Phoenix Theatre all came on stream before 1982, the year the Edmonton Fringe Festival was born. Modelled on Edinburgh’s Fringe, Edmonton’s festival has become hugely successful with annual attendance in the quarter-million range, a prototype for the many other Canadian Fringes which have sprung up in its wake. Meanwhile, Toronto continued its theatrical expansion to the point where it could claim to be second city only to New York for theater in North America. Among its important new companies were Necessary Angel, Nightwood (Canada’s foremost feminist theater), Buddies in Bad Times (soon the country’s most important gay company), Cahoots (multicultural), and Native Earth Performing Arts, which led the renaissance of Native theater in Canada.

Canadian Theater Awards Canadian theater’s growing cultural prominence was also signified by a series of new awards. Joining the prestigious Chalmers, given since 1972 for best new Canadian play produced in Toronto, were the Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Drama (est. 1975) and, in 1981, the Governor General’s Award in Drama honoring the best new Canadian play in publication in French and in English. The Doras in Toronto (after Dora Mavor Moore), the Jessies in Vancouver (after Jessie Richardson), the Sterlings in Edmonton (after Elizabeth Sterling Haynes) and the Bettys in Calgary (after Betty Mitchell) celebrate the best work done on those cities’ stages in the name of a local theatrical pioneer. Add to those the Mecca awards, honoring English-language theater in Montreal, a counterpart to the Masque awards for French-language theater in Quebec. The $50,000 Alcan Arts Award is now given annually to a producing company in British Columbia,

Modern Canadian Theater and the Siminovitch Prize for a Canadian theater artist in mid-career is worth $100,000. The 1984–85 publication of three anthologies of Canadian drama in English also helped make Canadian plays more accessible and academically reputable.

1980S TO THE PRESENT Some things notably changed by the mid-1980s. The nationalism that had inspired and helped kick-start the new Canadian theater had mostly gone out of vogue. Free trade and globalism were becoming the new keywords. As economic issues superseded nationalism on the larger political landscape, economics assumed greater political and artistic impact in the theater. Canada’s theater was increasingly perceived as a commercial commodity, having to find its niche in a competitive and fragmented cultural marketplace battered by recession and dominated by home videos. A few writers profited as hit plays from small nonprofit stages got remounted in large, long-run commercial venues. Love and Anger by George F. Walker, whose Nothing Sacred had been a breakthrough hit in American regional theaters in 1988, and the hard-hitting Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love by Brad Fraser, which also had later international success, crossed over into commercial production, along with Tomson Highway’s dark comedy about Native life, Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.

The Megamusical The most significant development of the commercialized theater was the appearance of the megamusical. A building and renovation boom accompanied the phenomenon. In 1985, to accommodate Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, Toronto’s old Elgin Theatre/Winter Garden complex was restored to its former glories and Cats ran for two years. In 1989 entertainment mogul Garth Drabinsky renovated another magnificent old vaudeville house, the Pantages, for Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera, which ran there for ten years, selling over seven million tickets. Producers Ed and David Mirvish opened Les Miserables at their Royal Alexandra Theatre and built the Princess of Wales to house Miss Saigon. Drabinsky’s Livent Inc. became the largest theatrical production company in North America, importing shows and creating its own musicals for export. The megamusical boom fueled the theatrical economy, creating international stars of Canadian actors like Brent Carver, and spin-off opportunities for a few Canadian nonmusical plays. But on the whole it posed severe challenges for the Canadian nonprofit theater. Rather than benefitting from a trickle-down of new audiences created by the megas, low-budget companies found themselves in difficult competition for the theater-going dollar. The success of these shows also

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Western Drama through the Ages shaped audience expectation and demand, fostering pressures to conform to the megamusical aesthetic—high on spectacle, low on content, lacking in Canadian reference and empty of political challenge. By 1998, with the novelty of the genre waning, his empire overextended, and Drabinsky himself accused of cooking the books, Livent collapsed, and the smaller, nonprofit theaters where most Canadian plays are born and performed survived the debacle, but at a cost. Many felt that the economic squeeze of the 1990s created a survival mentality whereby artistic directors tended to minimize risk and opt for safe programming. Canada’s ‘‘poorly funded non-profits embrace facile populism,’’ complained Kate Taylor in The Globe and Mail. And what could be safer or more facile than putting pretty pictures on stage?

Entering the Twenty-First Century in Canadian Theater Yet one of the strengths of the Canadian theater as it entered the twenty-first century was its development of a complex visual vocabulary, from the neobaroque mise en sce`ne favored by many Que´be´cois playwrights and directors to image-based physical theater, clown, mime, movement, dance, and puppetry. Artistic Fraud of Newfoundland, Montreal’s Carbone 14, Toronto’s Theatre Smith-Gilmour, Calgary’s One Yellow Rabbit, and Vancouver’s Boca del Lupo are some of the companies that complement the spoken word with sharply detailed, carefully choreographed visual effects. The remarkably sophisticated marionette shows of Calgary’s Ronnie Burkett have been seen and honored around the world. The first major success of the new century was Morris Panych’s Vancouver Playhouse production and subsequent international tour of Gogol’s The Overcoat, performed without a single word. Robert Lepage writes, performs, directs, and designs the visually stunning plays that have made him and his Quebec City company an international phenomenon. Canada’s greatest economic success on the world stage, and one of its genuine artistic triumphs, is the spectacle theater of Cirque du Soleil. Since its founding in 1984, the Montreal-based company has redefined the circus and established a global empire, including an increasing number of shows permanently running in Las Vegas. ‘‘Canada on the World Stage’’ headlined Canadian Theatre Review’s Winter 2001 issue examining the export of Canadian drama to the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, Belgium, India, and Australia. Plays by Michel Tremblay, Morris Panych, Daniel MacIvor, and George F. Walker, as well as a new Cirque du Soleil show, were running simultaneously in Washington DC, at that time, leading Lloyd Rose in the Washington Post to declare that ‘‘Canada is hot.’’ Though Canada remains a net theatrical importer, playwrights like Walker (Nothing Sacred), John Krizanc (Tamara), Brad Fraser (Unidentified Human Remains and Poor Super Man), and Morris Panych (Vigil, retitled Auntie and Me in

Modern Canadian Theater London) have had major international hits. The growing interest in postcolonial studies has also brought added attention to Canadian theater at international conferences and in collections of plays and essays published abroad. Also being crossed more often is the border dividing Quebec’s French-language culture from the theater of English Canada. Until recently, few francophone playwrights from Quebec had any impact in English—notably Gratien Ge´linas and Michel Tremblay. Now Robert Lepage, Michel Marc Bouchard, and Wajdi Mouwad regularly appear in English. The bridging of the solitudes from the English side has been less dramatic, but Brad Fraser, Judith Thompson, Wendy Lill, Sally Clark, and Colleen Wagner have gotten French-language productions in Montreal. The´aˆtre de Quat’Sous, the theater most closely associated with Tremblay’s Quebec nationalism, produced four of George Walker’s Suburban Motel plays in French translation in its 1998–99 season, along with Daniel MacIvor’s Monster, its first play ever in English. Cultural diversity is another sign of Canadian theater’s relative well-being. The last decade has seen the publication of play anthologies from Newfoundland, the Maritimes, the North, and the ‘‘new ethnic West,’’ from lesbians and gays, First Nations, and African Canadians, as well as special Canadian Theatre Review issues on Native, Black, South Asian, Chinese, and Italian Canadian theater. Women are more fully represented in the playwriting ranks, thanks in part to feminist theater organizations such as Toronto’s Nightwood, founded as a collective in 1979, and perhaps best known for Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet). Native Earth Performing Arts (est. 1982) developed Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, and has been instrumental in the work of other important Native writers like Drew Hayden Taylor and Marie Clements. Montreal’s Festival de the´aˆtre des Ame´riques and Toronto’s du Maurier World Stage have been important showcases for innovative theater from Canada and around the world. Two important Calgary festivals, Alberta Theatre Projects’ New PlayRites and One Yellow Rabbit’s experimental High Performance Rodeo, joined established new play development organizations like the Banff Centre, Playwrights’ Workshop of Montreal, Vancouver’s New Play Centre/Playwrights Theatre Centre and Toronto’s Rhubarb! Festival. Companies devoted to classical work denote an interesting trend in recent Canadian theater. Toronto’s acclaimed Soulpepper company (1998) produces only traditional and modern classics, as does Vancouver’s Blackbird (2005). And Shakespearean festivals are everywhere: Shakespeare-on-the-Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Repercussion Theatre in Montreal, Bard on the Beach in Vancouver, Edmonton’s Shakespeare-in-the-Park, a Shakespeare-by-the-Sea in Halifax and another in St. John’s, and Toronto’s Shakespeare in the Rough. Meanwhile, the Stratford and Shaw festivals enjoy unprecedented box office success. That this

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Western Drama through the Ages kind of foundational theater can thrive alongside theaters devoted to new Canadian plays is a sign of stability and maturity. The continued emergence of exciting young companies creating their own new work, like Vancouver’s Electric Company, and the rebirth of Ottawa’s National Arts Centre as a vital link in the regional system, co-producing new and established Canadian plays, are cause for further optimism that Canadian theater remains on a healthy trajectory.

FURTHER READING Appleford, Rob, ed. Aboriginal Drama and Theatre. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005. Benson, Eugene and L.W. Conolly. English-Canadian Theatre. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987. ———, eds. The Oxford Companion to Canadian Theatre. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1989. Bessai, Diane. Playwrights of Collective Creation. Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1992. Brask, Per, ed. Contemporary Issues in Canadian Drama. Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1995. Brydon, Diana and Irena R. Makaryk, eds. Shakespeare in Canada: A World Elsewhere? Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Coulter, John. ‘‘The Canadian Theatre and the Irish Exemplar.’’ Theatre Arts Monthly 22 (July 1938): 503, 508. Davies, Robertson. The Well-Tempered Critic: One Man’s View of Theatre and Letters in Canada. Edited by Judith Skelton Grant. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1981. Donohoe, Joseph I., Jr. and Jonathan M. Weiss, eds. Essays on Modern Quebec Theatre. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995. Filewod, Alan. Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987. ———. ‘‘National Theatre/National Obsession.’’ Canadian Theatre Review 62 (Spring 1990): 6 ———. Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre. Kamloops, British Columbia: Textual Studies in Canada, 2002. Gould, Jack. ‘‘Canada Shows Us How.’’ New York Times Sept. 1, 1946, Sec. II: 7. Grace, Sherrill and Albert-Reiner Glaap, eds. Performing National Identities: International Perspectives on Contemporary Canadian Theatre. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2003. Johnston, Denis. Up the Mainstream: The Rise of Toronto’s Alternative Theatres. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Kinch, Martin. ‘‘The Canadian Theatre: In for the Long Haul.’’ This Magazine 10 (Nov.–Dec. 1976): 4–5. Knowles, Richard Paul. The Theatre of Form and the Production of Meaning: Contemporary Canadian Dramaturgies. Toronto: ECW Press, 1999. Much, Rita, ed. Women on the Canadian Stage: The Legacy of Hrotsvit. Winnipeg: Blizzard, 1992. Portman, Jamie. ‘‘Ecstasy of Rita Joe Still Manages to Shock and Scourge.’’ Vancouver Province April 12, 1976: 10.

Modern Canadian Theater Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences. Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1951. Rose, Lloyd. ‘‘Onstage, Works with a Distinct Canadian Accent.’’ Washington Post September 10, 2000: G24. Rubin, Don, ed. Canadian Theatre History: Selected Readings. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2005. Taylor, Kate. ‘‘The Play’s the Thing.’’ Globe and Mail December 26, 2000: R1. Walker, Craig Stewart. The Buried Astrolabe: Canadian Dramatic Imagination and the Western Tradition. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001. Wasserman, Jerry, ed. Modern Canadian Plays. 4th ed. 2 vols. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2000/01. Zimmerman, Cynthia. Playwriting Women: Female Voices in English Canada. Toronto: Simon & Pierre, 1994.

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Czech Drama Veronika Ambros

‘‘ENGAGED’’ PLAYWRIGHTS BETWEEN ENLIGHTENMENT AND GENTLE REVOLUTION The Swiss playwright Friedrich Du¨rrenmatt (1972) once remarked that it was not necessary for a playwright in Czechoslovakia (during the periods 1918–38 or 1945–93) to be engaged in politics, since the audience ‘‘engaged’’ an author for political purposes and provided a political reading of any play. In fact, in Bohemia (today the Czech Republic) culture in general and theater in particular have a long-standing tradition of being relevant. Since Czech drama and theater have a history of challenging social, artistic, ideological, and even political order, it came as no surprise for many when in 1989 the Gentle Revolution was staged in theaters and Va´clav Havel, a playwright and dissident, was subsequently elected president of Czechoslovakia (1989–92) and later the Czech Republic (1993– 2003). Although Shakespeare set The Winter’s Tale in Bohemia, the land has very little to do with his fictional deserts or coasts. Nonetheless, it was the birthplace of the English Queen Anne of Bohemia the daughter of Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, and the wife of Richard II of England (1366–94). In this period the first play, Masticˇka´rˇ (Ungentarius), written in Czech, German, and Latin (and bogus Hebrew) is recorded. This text about a merchant of ointments, his servant and three Marys, mocks the genre of Easter plays by combining secular and liturgical, sacred and profane elements into a ‘‘sacred farce’’ (Veltrusky´ 1985). Thus, Czech drama was firmly ensconced in the European tradition of Passion plays.

Czech Drama In the fifteenth century, however, the Hussites, followers of the church reformer Jan Hus (c. 1369–1415), opposed drama and rejected actors and jesters. Following the Catholic victory at the White Mountain in 1618, many Protestants had to leave the country. Among the exiles was Jan A´mos Komensky´ (Comenius) (1592–1670), a teacher, scholar, and the last bishop of the Unity of the Brethren. Komensky´’s work includes several plays in Latin and a dramatization of his tract Ianua linguarum reserata (The Doorway to Languages Is Open, 1631) called Schola ludus (School through game/play, 1654), promoting ideas that have influenced pedagogy ever since. During the counter-reformation, Bohemia was no longer an independent kingdom with Czech as a language of administration but a province of the Habsburg monarchy. Most plays, mainly school plays introduced by the Jesuits in the sixteenth century, were performed in Latin while the folk theater in the countryside maintained Czech as a language of communication. In the eighteenth century, ˇ esky´ Krumlov, addressed and the court stages, such as the one at the castle C entertained the noble audience. There an intricate system of murals and mirrors decorated with scenes from commedia dell’arte in the Masquerade Hall (1748) exemplified the way in which the stage challenged the viewer’s imagination and evoked an illusion of reality. The few dramatic texts in Czech were less complex and often translations from German or Latin. The puppet theater presented among others the Czech version of the ubiquitous jester named Kasˇpa´rek as well as various adaptations of the Faust story.

CREATING A NATION Following the ideas of the Enlightenment the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) painted a bright future for the Slavs. Eager to make this vision happen, the representatives of the Czech national revival showed a rapidly increasing interest in Czech language, culture, literature, theater, and drama as an expression of national autonomy. As a result, Czech nationalism found its outlet in theater where the emerging ‘‘theatrical nationhood’’ manifested itself through rituals and ceremonies that abolished the division into spectators and actors. In fact, these public events produced ’’a new form of national communication.’’ Paradoxically, the prevalent cultural model for Prague (at that time a capital of a province in the Austrian empire) was in general the capital of the monarchy, Vienna. Although the texts reflected an urban petit bourgeois milieu their language maintained an idealized concept of theater as a place where a ‘‘noble’’ speech had to be used, the social and local origins of the characters notwithstanding. As Stanley Kimball comments: ‘‘[T]he Czechs always thought of their theatre in ideal terms.. . .Their theatre was, apparently, never to be used to portray the baser emotions, or merely to entertain.’’

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Western Drama through the Ages The works by Jan Nepomuk Sˇteˇpa´nek (1783–1844) represent the beginnings of modern Czech drama. His comedy Cˇech a Neˇmec (Czech and German, 1816) portrayed the peaceful coexistence of the two nations. Comedies by Va´ clav Kliment Klicpera (1792–1859) had been popular because of their humorous situations and use of language, which in some cases prefigures the devices of the theater of the absurd. This is particularly true of Veselohra na mosteˇ (Comedy on the Bridge, 1828), a story about people who are caught on a bridge neither permitted to continue their journey nor to return. The Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu˚ turned the playlet into an eponymous opera in 1935. One of the most prominent proponents of the national revival, Josef Kajeta´n Tyl (1808–56), used the Viennese local farces by Johann Nepomuk Nestroy as a model for his comedies. This applies for instance to Fidlovacˇka (Shoemakers fair, 1834), which introduced the present Czech national anthem, the song ‘‘Kde domov mu˚j?’’ (’’Where Is My Home?’’). For Tyl, who also wrote several historical plays, the primary goal of theater is to educate by showing ‘‘not what is, but what should be.’’ Tyl, like numerous other volunteers, supported the idea of the National Theatre in Prague and contributed to the building, which was completed in 1881.

ENTERING THE INTERNATIONAL STAGE At the turn of the twentieth century, critics (F.X. Sˇalda, Otakar Fischer, V. Tille, and J. Voda´k) were no longer interested in the utilitarian qualities of the reviewed works, but based on their knowledge of contemporary international trends in theater, literature, and culture applied aesthetic criteria while reviewing the literary and theatrical production. Furthermore, theater directors began to experiment with various models of theater and used modern technologies such as film projections on stage as early as 1902. In addition, genres of ‘‘mere’’ entertainment (cabaret, operettas) and popular culture in general questioned the traditional notion of theater. Simultaneously, due to the new stage both the famous Prague German literature and also a diversified Czech repertoire (Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Werfel, Franz Kafka, Antonı´n Dvorˇa´k, Bedrˇich Smetana) emerged. Initially limited to historical or rural topics, it slowly incorporated impulses of symbolist, naturalist, and realistic drama. The increased number of playwrights included women. In fact, the plays by Gabriela Preissova´ (1862–1946) Gazdina roba (The Farmer’s Woman, 1889) and Jejı´ pastorkyneˇ (Her stepdaughter, 1890), focusing on female heroines in a rural setting have been a part of the Czech dramatic and operatic canon. The Czech composer Leosˇ Jana´cˇek (1854–1928) based his opera Jenufa (1904) on Preissova´’s drama in which a child’s murder reveals the stifling social conventions. Also set in the countryside was Marysˇ a (1894) a successful dramatic work by the Mrsˇ tı´k

Czech Drama brothers, Alois (1861–1925) and Vile´m (1863–1912), about the eponymous heroine who tries to escape her unhappy marriage by poisoning her husband. One of the few comedies of that period, Nasˇi furianti (Our Uppish and Defiant Fellows also translated as Our Swaggerers, 1887) by Ladislav Stroupezˇnicky´ about farmers trying to outwit each other, has also been part of the Czech dramatic canon. The majority of dramatic works were initially domestic dramas, historical plays, and fairy tales. One of the prolific authors of this period was Jaroslav Vrchlicky´ (1853–1912) whose dramatic texts were often inspired by Renaissance and antique mythology. As an exponent of Czech history, Alois Jira´sek (1851– 1930), in his plays Jan Hus (1911) and Jan Zˇ izˇ ka (1903), about the military commander of the Hussites, introduced the conflict between an individual and a collective typical of expressionistic drama. Julius Zeyer (1841–1901) contributed to the repertoire of the newly established National Theatre with fairy tales (Radu´z and Mahulena, 1896) and plays on topics allegedly from Czech mythology, but based, in fact, on medieval manuscripts forged at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Zeyer’s Stara´ historie (Old history, 1883) was the first text to introduce commedia dell’arte in Czech. However, ˇ apek brothers, while Zeyer confirmed the genre, the very first one-act play by the C Josef (1886–1945) and Karel (1890–1938), La´sky hra osudna´ (The Fateful Game of Love, 1910–11), mocked the same convention, by turning comedy into tragedy. Many techniques developed in this text were used in the later dramatic oeuvre of both brothers, who introduced to Czech drama expressionist elements, science fiction, fairy tale, and other genres, as well as topics such as the clash between intuition and intellect, longevity, creation of a new man, along with individual and collective responsibility. ˇ apeks were popular European authors, known for Between the wars, both C ˇ apek was among the well-known their innovative approach to theater. Josef C modern artists (e.g., Vlastislav Hoffman, Frantisˇek Muzika, and Bedrˇich Feuerˇ apek’s translations of French poetry stein) who worked as set designers. Karel C set an example for the Czech avant-garde poets. His drama R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots, 1921) was immediately translated into many languages (the famous Theater Guild in New York performed it as early as 1922), and the word robot that Josef derived from the Czech robota (drudgery, unpaid work required of a vassal by a feudal lord) entered the international vocabulary. In contrast to the current conˇ apek’s robots are not mechanical creatures, but biologically vention, however, C produced androids with great memory capacity and no past to remember. The play depicts the conflict between intellect and intuition and shows the process by which the people are dehumanized and the robots are humanized. This creation of the human imagination has an impressive literary pedigree (following in the footsteps of the artificial human being Golem of the medieval Jewish tradition, the Homunculus in Goethe’s Faust, and Shelley’s monster in Frankenstein).

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Western Drama through the Ages Although the action focuses on the human characters and their clash with their product, in an expressionistic manner both the title and the subtitle announce a collective hero, the robots, who, true products of ‘‘Rossum,’’ i.e., reason, lack emoˇ apek stressed the utopian tions, have no ‘‘soul.’’ Setting the action on an island, C ˇ apek made his character of the prologue. By beginning the story in his own time, C audience aware of the dystopia, i.e., of the conceivably catastrophic consequences of contemporary trends, and pointed to the dangers of neglecting to learn from the past. After the success of R.U.R., the two brothers created a mystery play Ze zˇivota hmyzu (From the Life of Insects, 1922), which belongs as a cornerstone of the Czech theater repertoire. The title indicates again a collective hero and stresses the fictional world as a mere slice of life. The action focuses on the journey of a vagrant (tula´k) who acts as a guide through several stations of the insect world showing a very human-like behavior of the insects with whom he also interacts. Thus akin to the singer in Bertolt Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948) he defamiliarizes the familiar. In spite of the author’s indication of the genre as mystery play, which is confirmed in several ways (especially in the names of characters denoting different ˇ apek’s work mixes, in fact, several genres. It is a satirical groups of insects), C comedy mocking the human vices. It is a fairy tale with an ending at once tragic and optimistic, and finally it is an expressionistic grotesque in which the insects remain people except for having the insect-like features of real people. The ˇ apeks have famous predecessors in this as well, for instance in Aristophanes’s C satirical comedies and animal fables. Yet, as Lubomir Dolezˇel comments, the world of the insects is not a ‘‘space of exciting, childlike adventure’’ but much closer to Kafka’s ‘‘space of existential anxiety.’’ ˇ apek’s last drama, Matka (The/A Mother, 1938) is ‘‘the most consistently Karel C ˇ apek’s dramas’’ according to William Harkins. The protagoexpressionistic of C nist’s Spanish name Dolores connotes the archetypal mater dolorosa, the suffering mother, and the civil war in Spain of that period. The heroine is a widowed mother devoted entirely to her family, who over the course of the play loses her four sons to different causes (medical, technological research, a political battle). Eventually, when she learns that children of her country are being killed, she herself gives her last son a gun to defend his homeland. Written in times of acute political conflicts (war in Spain, Hitler’s war threat, the spread of Nazist Party in Czechoslovakia) it has often been considered an openly anti-fascist work. The play, however, accomplishes more than the propagation of ideas. The action is presented as an interior monologue or stream of consciousness in which some of the voices of the protagonist’s memory materialize. As the characters themselves claim: ‘‘She alone can hear us.’’ Incidentally, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, written in the same year as ˇ apek’s Matka, uses a similar technique to conjure up the past. In many respects, C

Czech Drama attempt to stage novelistic stream-of-consciousness techniques in the manner of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf predates the contemporary theater of memory such as that of the Polish director Tadeusz Kantor. ˇ apek brothers Another prominent Czech playwright and a close friend of the C was Frantisˇek Langer whose comedy in three acts Velbloud uchem jehly (Camel through the Needle’s Eye) written in 1924 was presented by the prestigious Theatre Guild in New York 196 times. Langer questions the stereotypes about impoverished people by showing a young girl from a lowly background skillfully acquiring the knowledge necessary for a successful businesswoman. Her affluent lover, in contrast, offers a male version of Pygmalion, of a taciturn young man who is being molded into a useful and diligent member of the industrious, poor, but clean family of his girl friend. In Periferie (Periphery, 1925) as Alfred Polgar writes, the outskirts are not a mere backdrop but the central topic of the play ‘‘which discovers in the refuse of a city human dignity and value.’’ The famous German director Max Reinhardt brought this story about crime without punishment, about justice and the inadequacy of the traditional legal system to international stages in Berlin, Vienna, and the United States in 1927 and 1928. In the character of a man in front of the curtain, Langer introduces the epic device of a commentator, who akin to the intertitles in silent movies, describes the movement of the hero and his thoughts, but most of all, similar to a lyrical ‘‘I,’’ personifies subjective time. A similar technique became the main attraction in the Liberated theater, the ‘‘most popular theater in Czechoslovakia between the wars’’ in Michael Quinn’s opinion. By improvising their dialogues in front of the curtain, the authors and comedians Jirˇ´ı Voskovec (1905–81) and Jan Werich (1905–80) (known as V+W) partially revived the tradition of cabarets, music-halls and commedia dell’arte. In their rarely recorded talks both actors commented on current issues or on the stage action, hence constantly moving between the fictional world of the stage and the real world of the proscenium, and breaking the illusion of an as if world. In 1936, the Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold declared Only tonight, October 30, 1936, I saw the ‘‘zanni’’. . .in the persons of the unforgettable duo of Voskovec and Werich, and was once more bewitched by performers rooted in the Italian commedia improviso. Long live commedia dell’arte! Long live Voskovec and Werich!

Hence, as the German theater semiotician Herta Schmid said, V+W made ‘‘a specific contribution to the anti-illusionist theatre of the European avant-garde.’’ The first play of the duo Vest Pocket Revue (1927) is a good example of their technique. The plot offers only a pretext for a variety of expressions that in keeping with the title mock the crazy comedies of American cinema. The scenes present dialogues, dance, and film as separate units, sometimes without any

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Western Drama through the Ages connection to the action of the plot. As a result, the play points to the ‘‘metamorphosis of the relationship between the absurdity of art and absurdity of reality,’’ in the words of Vratislav Effenberger. While the Czech theater historian Adolf Scherl speaks about Voskovec and Werich lyricizing the theater, the German journalist Friedrich Torberg sums up the wide range of their humor, which had: ‘‘to cover everything that is divided up in Germany among six or eight different types of theatre, revue, and cabaret. From Bert Brecht to Paul Nikolaus, from Erich Ka¨stner to Fritz Gru¨nbaum.’’ In fact, their jokes are often akin to the humor in the popular novel by Jaroslav Hasˇek The Fortunes of the Good Soldier Sˇ vejk during the War, adapted for stage by Erwin Piscator and Bertolt Brecht in 1928. Another type of stage experiment was offered by the director E.F. Burian. In his theater (founded in the 1930s) Burian staged historical texts such as the medieval Masticˇka´rˇ, folk theater, surrealist plays, and dramatizations of prose and poetry. In the performances of the poem ‘‘May,’’ by the romantic Czech poet Karel Hynek Ma´cha, which used extensively projections, movements, and music, the visual means acquired a prominent position, and created a scenic poem similar to the staging practice of contemporary directors such as Robert Wilson or Robert Lepage. In general, Czech drama and theater flourished during the first Czechoslovak Republic (1918–38) and came close to the ideal expressed by the stage director Karel Hugo Hilar: ‘‘A community in which poet fuses with spectator, director with poet, designer with actor, and theater aesthetician with this entire circle that burns with dramatic enthusiasm.’’ In fact, Czech playwrights of that period were engaged in creating the theater community Hilar envisaged. They were supported by the scholars of the Prague linguistic circle (founded in 1926), who laid the ground for the contemporary semiotics of drama and theater. By examining the use of theatrical signs in folklore and contemporary stage, and by discussing categories such as dialogue and monologue based on current practice, they offered a model of a remarkable cooperation between theater practitioners and theorists.

BETWEEN SOCIALIST REALISM AND MODEL THEATER In the dire period of the forties and fifties, authors were to comply with the demands of the so-called Socialist Realism, which expected literary texts to serve the needs of the communist party. Yet even then, new names emerged (Pavel Kohout, Frantisˇek Hrubı´n), as well as Burian’s pupils the directors Otomar Krejcˇa and Alfre´d Radok, and the playwright Josef Topol. By the end of the fifties small studio theaters introduced a new notion of performance—a combination of text, songs and movements. In addition, Alfre´d Radok’s extremely successful blend of

Czech Drama dance, text, and film projection called Laterna Magika [Magic Lantern] attracted audiences at the world exhibit in Brussels in 1958. The artistic efforts of the sixties widely contributed to the impression the British Kenneth Tynan had upon his return from Prague when he called the city ‘‘the theatre capital of Europe.’’ Among the most significant playwrights was Josef Topol (1935), whose Konec masopustu (End of the Carnival, 1963) was staged at the National Theatre (1964) while his remarkable one-act play Kocˇka na kolejı´ch (Cat on the rails, 1965) marks the beginning of Krejcˇa’s famous Divadlo za branou (Theatre beyond the Gate, 1965–72). The fifteen scenes in Konec masopustu are set in a Czech village in which all farmers but one joined the cooperative under pressure, an act demanded by the new socialist regime. The exception is explained by Eva Stehlı´kova´: Frantisˇ ek Kra´ l, Frank King, is truly the king of the village thanks to his moral qualities. But the days of his reign are numbered and, paradoxically, it is not he who will be killed but his son who is destined to be the next king, which means that the future is being destroyed.

The text of the play ends with an announced trial, which might bestow justice and restore a primordial order of the community. Hence, what appears at first as a master plot of a socialist realist drama about the re-education of an obstinate opponent of the new rule turns into a very complex play, in which fragments of the actual world are intertwined with that of a mystery play. In addition, close to the manner of analytic drama the present tragedy is caused by past events. The masks, which underscore the carnival of the title are used as a chorus both inside and outside the story, and give the text a mythological and lyrical dimension. The Czech theater historian Stehlı´kova´ says about Topol’s Konec masopustu and Milan Kundera’s drama Majitele´ klı´cˇu˚ (The Owners of the Keys, 1962): In contrast to the bloodless adaptations of Greek drama, both plays belong to the best Czech plays written in the last century and, through them, Czech audiences experienced the true meaning of the expressions such as ‘‘classics’’ and ‘‘tragedy.’’

At first glance, Kundera’s play seems to fit the heroic plot of a socialist realist drama. Set during World War II, the protagonist faces the question of responsibility, a decision about the life and death of his wife and her petit-bourgeois family. Visions of the protagonist, however, somewhat reminiscent of Matka, interrupt the linearity of the plot, provide an insight into his inner struggle, and underscore the precarious dilemma of the hero. As a result, Kundera similarly to Topol subverts the norms of socialist realism and sets forth the Czech tradition of poetic drama.

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Western Drama through the Ages Va´clav Havel (b. 1936) achieved a similar effect with his first play Zahradnı´ slavnost (The Garden Party, 1963). His point of departure, however, is the tradition of the Liberated theater, and the linguistic games of V+W, for instance, when the protagonist Hugo Pludek resorts to ‘‘vacuous verbal balancing acts’’ such as the following: In fact, they were both sort of right and sort of wrong—or rather, on the contrary—both were wrong and both right, weren’t they? I mean they were, were they not?’’

Hence, Hugo demonstrates what Havel calls ‘‘evasive thinking’’ and ‘‘phraseological ritual.’’ He reveals the mechanism of formulaic language by appropriating fragments of overheard conversations, thus creating a discourse consisting of disjointed catch phrases. While Hugo succeeds professionally, he loses himself, his own identity, in the process. Havel’s second play Vyrozumeˇnı´ (The Memorandum, 1965) targets language bared of any meaning. The memorandum of the title is a text written in an artificial language called ptydepe, which endorses the attempts of Gross, the director of the office in which the action is set, to liquidate ‘‘any attempt to introduce ptydepe.’’ The alleged victory of Gross, however, is at the same time his defeat, since the office uses another new language called chorukor. Martin Esslin, for whom Havel is one of the representatives of satirical absurd theater, lists ‘‘hard-hitting satire, Schweikian humor and Kafkaesque depth’’ among the characteristics of Havel’s work. Although Esslin uses Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasˇek as cliche´s associated with Prague, by including Havel in a literary tradition originally attributed to the West he implies that the divide between East and West is merely an imaginary one. In addition, Havel and most of his colleagues of the sixties (Ivan Klı´ma, Pavel Kohout, Milan Uhde, and Ladislav Smocˇek) did not present questions about human existence, as did the representatives of the theater of the absurd such as Ionesco and Beckett. The Czech playwrights devised models of a society in which the individual is caught in a vicious circle of rules a collective imposed on him. Jan Grossman, the director of the Theatre on the Balustrade, where Havel worked as a stagehand and later as dramaturg, commented on Havel’s ability to establish a dialogue with his audience. In fact, the playwrights of the sixties continued the tradition of their predecessors who activated and challenged their spectators by showing absurdity on stage, through which they exposed the absurd conditions around them. The Soviet invasion of August 1968, however, interrupted the flourishing dramatic and theatrical experiments of the sixties, and brought radical changes to Czech society. As Havel explains: [It] did not just mean the routine replacement of a more liberal regime with a more conservative one . . .it was the end of an era; the disintegration of a spiritual and

Czech Drama social climate; a profound mental dislocation.. . .Suddenly, instead of laughing, one felt like shouting.

FORGING A COMMUNITY In the seventies, most Czech playwrights were left ‘‘without a stage,’’ and the stages remained without their playwrights, directors, and even actors. The acclaimed directors were forced to leave Prague, or work abroad; many writers were not allowed to publish. Even the journals Divadlo (Theater) and Divadelnı´ noviny (Theater News) were abolished. Neither the so-called samizdat (a limited number of privately distributed manuscripts) nor the publishing houses in exile (Toronto, Cologne) could fill the gap. Yet it was often through them that plays by the so-called dissident authors were performed abroad. In fact, the dramatic texts by Havel, Topol, Kundera, Kohout and other prominent writers of the sixties became, as it were, exiled. The contact with their audience was disrupted. Pavel Kohout, who dramatized two novels in the sixties, continued this line of work with Uboh y´ vrah (Poor Murderer, 1976), based on the short story Thought by Leonid Andreyev that opened on Broadway in 1976. Kundera’s Jakub a jeho pa´n (Jacques and his Master, 1975) an adaptation of Denis Diderot’s novel Jacques le fataliste et son maıˆtre (1796) was staged by Susan Sonntag. Especially popular internationally were three one-act texts by Havel originally conceived to entertain his friends: Audience (1975), Vernisa´zˇ (Unveiling, 1975) and Protest (1978). Although they share their protagonist Vaneˇk, a dissident, in retrospect, Havel says about them that they ‘‘. . .are essentially not about Vaneˇk, but plays about the world as it reveals itself when confronted with Vaneˇk.’’ Hence, this character, similar to the ˇ apek’s drama, provides a point of view for the spectator that helps vagrant in C him or her to recognize in the fictional world his or her own world. In 1977, about a thousand people of various convictions and occupations signed a manifesto Charter 77, demanding human rights, and civil liberties. Havel was one of the first spokesmen of the group, an activity that led first to his arrest, then several years of prison, and eventually paradoxically to his presidency. Upon his return from jail, he wrote numerous essays and the play in seven scenes, Largo Desolato (1984), dedicated to the British playwright Tom Stoppard. In many respects, the drama is close to a musical composition. Three of the seven scenes are introduced by solemn music contrasted with the pantomime in which Leopold Koprˇiva, a philosopher who expects his imminent arrest, enacts his fear by staring at the main entrance. The fifth scene, ‘‘extreme in tempo,’’ motivated by an excessive drug consumption in which the characters repeat the imputations of others, appears as an externalized interior monologue (similar to Matka, or Majitele´) and shows Largo Desolato as a modern tragedy of a man who lost his identity. Koprˇ iva’s dilemma, however, is just another version of the predicament the medieval French writer Francois Villon faces in Hodina mezi psem a vlkem

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Western Drama through the Ages (The hour between dog and wolf, 1979) by Daniela Fischerova´ (b. 1948). She presents the fear of a poet who is afraid that if he were banished from Paris he would lose his creativity. By using modern props such as a tape recorder and cameras, Fischerova´ makes this drama topical by counterpointing the historical character with the present of the actors in a modern trial. The dialogues resemble academic disputes full of paradoxes such as: ‘‘The cat’s heaven and the mouse’s hell look exactly the same.’’ Herein Fischerova´ not only expresses her distrust of any definite statements but also alludes to a device typical for Villon’s poetry, the oxymoron: ‘‘I die of thirst beside the mountain spring’’ or ‘‘I laugh in tears’’. This is also true of scenes in which torture and labor are presented simultaneously. The authorities who ordered the play off the program indirectly confirmed its topicality. Another representative of the generation, who entered the Czech stage after 1968, is Arnosˇt Goldflam (b. 1946). His work presents a good example of the tendency typical of the seventies and eighties when theaters often refrained from language altogether (Cirkus Alfred, Bolek Polı´vka), or the dramatic texts that resembled screenplay-like-pretexts for staged action. Goldflam captures a certain atmosphere, a state of mind of a character or state of affairs of a generation, and implicitly society. His one-act-play Bileta´rˇka (The Ticket Girl, 1984; published 1989) presents a process in which the interior world surfaces in grotesque form. In the initial situation, the ticket girl from the title announces that the movie theater is facing technical difficulties. At the end, the viewers are admonished to retain their tickets for the next show. Hence, the action can be repeated ad infinitum. The text consists of a monologue interrupted by an offstage voice. Framed between the two announcements is the soliloquy of a plain girl who gradually assumes the role of a master and demands that the spectators abide by her rules. The play is also typical of the tendency of the eighties when several companies abolished the boundaries between actors and spectators. By creating a new community of audience and performers, they prepared the ground for the turnabout of 1989 staged in theaters, albeit without a script. Hence, the gentle revolution ultimately confirmed Du¨rrenmatt’s claim about the ‘‘engaged’’ playwrights.

FURTHER READING Brock, Peter, ed. The Czech Renascence of the Nineteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1970. Burian, Jarka. Leading Creators of Twentieth-Century Czech Theatre. London: Routledge, 2002. ———. Modern Czech Theatre. Reflector and Conscience of a Nation. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2000. ˇ apek—a Modern Storyteller.’’ in On Karel Cˇapek: Ed. Michael Dolezˇel, Lubomir. ‘‘Karel C Makin and Jindrˇich Toman. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1992. 15–28.

Czech Drama Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969. French, Alfred. Czech Writers and Politics 1945–1969. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982. Goetz-Stankiewicz, Marketa. The Silenced Theatre: Czech Playwrights Without a Stage. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979. ———. ed. The Vaneˇk Plays. Four Authors, One Character. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1987. Harkins, William Edward Karel Cˇapek. New York: Columbia University Press, 1962 Havel, Va´clav. Protokoly. Foreword by Jan Grossman. Praha: Mlada fronta, 1966 ———. The Garden Party. Translated and adapted from the Czech by Vera Blackwell. London: J. Cape, 1969. ———. Open Letters. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. Kimball, Stanley Buchholz. Czech Nationalism: A Study of the National Theatre Movement, 1845–83. Illinois Studies in the Social sciences, 54. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1964. Kruger, Loren. The National Stage (Theatre and Cultural Legitimation in England, France, and America). Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992. ˇ eskoslovensky´ spisovatel, 1968, Polgar, Alfred. In Langer, Frantisˇek, Periferie. Praha: C pp. 177–78. Quinn, Michael. ‘‘Jakobson and the Liberated Theater.’’ Stanford Slavic Studies 1 (1987): 153–55. Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia. A Czech History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Stehlı´kova´, Eva. ‘‘The Encounter between Greek Tragedy and Two Czech Playwrights in the Sixties’’ In: Eirene. 2003, vol. 44, No. XXXIX: 229–33. Steiner, Peter. The Deserts of Bohemia: Czech Fiction and Its Social Context. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000. Thomas, Alfred. Anne’s Bohemia. Foreword ‘‘Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420’’ by David Wallace. Chicago: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Trensky´, Pavel. Czech Drama Since World War II. Introduction by William E. Harkins. White Plains, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1978.

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German Drama Christoph E. Schweitzer

GERMAN DRAMA TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY In the history of German theater, the first dramatist of any note is Hans Sachs (1494–1576), the author of Schrovetide and other plays, the best of which are folksy and humorous. Richard Wagner made him famous in the opera Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg. The next century produced two very learned dramatists, Andreas Gryphius (1616–64) and Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein (1635–83). The former wrote a tragedy on the execution of Charles I entitled Carolus Stuardus, and Peter Squentz, a literary satire with a Shakespearean background. The eighteenth century was to see the rise of drama in an impressive display of quantity and diversity with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) being the pioneer. He wrote the still popular comedy Minna von Barnhelm in which the determined protagonist captures the beloved Tellheim, an officer in the Prussian army who is under suspicion of having misappropriated funds but is ultimately rehabilitated by Frederick II. Emilia Galotti, a tragedy, ends with Emilia’s begging her father to stab her, thus avoiding becoming the Prince’s mistress. With Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) Lessing created a plea for tolerance that is as relevant today as it was then. Its central parable, based on a story from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decamerone, tells us that no one knows who has the true ring—there are three, representing Judaism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity—but that we can prove ultimately that we possess the true one by showing that we are loved best by our neighbors.

German Drama

Goethe and Schiller Lessing is the epitome of the Enlightenment. The next generation, called Storm and Stress, rebelled against such emphasis on reason and stressed instead individualism and feeling. Jakob Michael Lenz’s (1751–92) Der Hofmeister (The Tutor) treats the seduction of a girl entrusted to the protagonist leading to his selfemasculation, while in Die Soldaten (The Soldiers) an officer seduces a girl who is then avenged by her bourgeois fiance´ who poisons the seducer. In both plays scenes and places change with dizzying rapidity, foreshadowing the structure of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) Go¨tz von Berlichingen and Faust I. Go¨tz made Goethe famous. The play is a nostalgic recreation of the times when barons celebrated their freedom and an indictment of the devious ways of the court that were to prevail. In Egmont the author created a monument to the Dutch national hero and with Iphigenie auf Tauris he renewed Euripides’ play with the heroine risking her brother’s and her own life by telling the King the truth, thus bringing about a more humane world. Torquato Tasso is a play about the artist who cannot come to terms with the world around him nor with his desires. Finally, there is Faust, the second part of which was not completed until one year before his death. The first part goes back to the Storm and Stress period and is the more accessible of the two. Its troubled protagonist enters into a pact with the devil, named Mephistopheles, who provides the magic potion that makes Faust young again. After scenes in which Faust and Gretchen (Margarete) profess their love to each other, unsurpassed in German drama for lyrical quality, the two meet in prison where she awaits death for having murdered their child, and he tries to make her escape with him. But she has turned to eternal justice. The second part is much longer and much more demanding since it takes in a great amount of Greek mythology. In the fifth act, Faust, after having reclaimed a great stretch of land from the sea, finally dies at a very old age. Love redeems him, ‘‘the eternal feminine pulls us up high.’’ Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) started with Die Ra¨uber (The Robbers), a play that pits brother against brother and abounds with violence and excessive individualism. In Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love) differences of class membership lead to the suicide of the two lovers. Then comes Don Carlos in which the ambitious Maquis Posa tries to change the protagonist’s unfortunate love for his stepmother to his helping the Dutch in their resistance to the Spanish. The play’s most famous line is Posa’s plea to Philip II, ‘‘Sir, grant freedom of thought.’’ Schiller’s best tragedy, Wallenstein, has a prelude, followed by two parts, thus making it too long for an evening performance. In it, the great imperial general of the Thirty Years War is murdered for trying to come to an agreement with the Swedes, the Emperor’s enemy. Within a world of opportunism only the young lovers remain pure and thus have to die. Queen Elizabeth’s decision to have her

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Western Drama through the Ages imprisoned rival executed forms the subject matter of the next play, Maria Stuart. Queen Elizabeth is seen at the end bereft of every friend and counselor. French history forms the background of Die Jungfrau von Orleans. In Schiller’s version she dies a heroic but un-historic death on the battlefield. His last play, the only one ending happily, is the story of the Swiss national hero Wilhelm Tell who, having been forced to shoot an apple off his son’s head, kills the bad tyrant. Between Goethe and Schiller, the latter is the theatrically more effective author while Goethe excels in lyrical language.

Form The plays that have been mentioned so far were written in a variety of forms. In the Baroque tragedies the Alexandrine—the verse form of Jean Racine—was used. It proved unwieldy in German. Lessing used prose except for his last play, Nathan der Weise, which is written in the Shakespearean iambic pentameter. Lenz’s plays as well as the early plays of Goethe and Schiller were in prose. These last two turned to iambic pentameter with Iphigenie auf Tauris and Don Carlos, respectively. In the nineteenth century, Heinrich von Kleist used the same metric form while Franz Grillparzer used a variety of meters. After Grillparzer prose was used predominantly in agreement with the authors’ intent of staying close to reality.

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The romantics did not produce any plays of significance except for the delightful comedy by Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), Der gestiefelte Kater (Puss in Boots), a textbook example of romantic irony with its destruction of every level of illusion. Even the fictive author of the play appears on the stage to defend his creation. Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) is the author of an often performed comedy, Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug). In it we witness Adam’s vain attempt to divert suspicion from himself for having broken a jug when almost being caught trying to seduce Eve. At the end he is chased out of the village. Penthesilea is based on Greek mythology. The title character, Queen of the Amazons, and Achilles cannot overcome mistaken assumptions so that in a rage she and her dogs set upon him and tear him to pieces, after which she dies, too. Finally, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg tells of the Prince’s successful but unauthorized attack for which he is sentenced to death. At first he begs for his life, something of course unbecoming to an officer and shocking at the time, but then is made to see the justice of the verdict and ultimately pardoned. Just as unusual a playwright as Kleist is Franz Bu¨chner, who died at age twentyfour in 1837. Dantons Tod (Danton’s Death) shows the end of Robespierre’s antagonist as a disillusioned revolutionary in a seemingly senseless world. Similar disillusionment and subsequent boredom inform the comedy Leonce und Lena in

German Drama which even love is an illusion and melancholy prevails. The short play Woyzeck was left unfinished, with two possible endings and uncertainty as to the sequence of some scenes. The poor, exploited protagonist is betrayed by Marie, the mother of their child. She takes up with the macho Drum Major, while Woyzeck must subsist on a diet of peas as a guinea pig for the Doctor’s experiment. At the end Woyzeck kills Marie with a knife. The emphasis on suffering with people not controlling their lives, and the absence of moral authority, make the play stand in stark contrast to the idealism of Goethe and Schiller. Later, among the naturalist playwrights, we see suffering playing a major role in the dramas of Gerhart Hauptmann. The plays of the Austrian Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872) deal in part with figures from his country’s past, as in Ko¨nig Ottokars Glu¨ck und Ende (King Ottocar, His Rise and Fall) and with Greek mythology as in Das Goldene Vlien. Also Austrian is the author of many brilliant comedies, Johann Nepomuk Nestroy (1801–62), a master of witticism and situation comedy, who wrote Einen Jux will er sich machen (To Have a Lark) which formed the basis of Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers. Friedrich Hebbel (1813–63) is the author of Maria Magdalena in which the protagonist, expecting a child by a man who abandons her, drowns herself so as to avoid bringing dishonor upon her father. In Herodes und Marianne Herodes’s doubting Marianne’s fidelity in case he should die prompts him to have her killed in that eventuality. When he persists in his doubt, she, revolting against the idea of being someone else’s property, pretends unfaithfulness so as to be executed. In Agnes Bernauer Hebbel pits private bliss—the love between the bourgeois Agnes and Albrecht, son of a duke—against the interest of the state, which wins out.

Naturalism In Norway it is Henrik Ibsen, in France Emile Zola, and in Germany Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946) who is the representative of Naturalism, a movement that tries to reproduce reality, especially heredity, physical drives, and the environment, as closely as possible. Vor Sonnenaufgang (Before Dawn) depicts a family ruined by alcoholism. Die Weber (The Weavers) shows the utter depravation and exploitation of a group of weavers and their failed uprising. This was the first German drama with a group of people at its center. With the next two plays Hauptmann returned to depicting the suffering individual. In Fuhrmann Henschel the protagonist is a drayman who commits suicide, having married after his wife’s death the maid, who cheats on him. Rose Bernd, in the play of the same name, is a peasant girl who is pursued by various men and driven to insanity. As did Faust’s Gretchen, Rose kills her own child. Hauptmann also wrote a comedy, Der Biberpelz (The Beaver Coat), in which the clever protagonist outwits Prussian bureaucracy. In the same vein the protagonist of Carl Zuckmayer’s

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Western Drama through the Ages (1896–1977) Der Hauptmann von Ko¨penick (The Captain of Ko¨penick), which is based on a true story, impersonates an officer and lays bare the blind obedience people pay to the state, represented here by a uniform. Faithfulness to the reproduction of the social setting also characterizes Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General (The Devil’s General) which depicts the voluntary death of a celebrated air force general who finally sees how evil the Nazi regime is.

TWENTIETH CENTURY GERMAN DRAMA Around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century two Austrian authors should be mentioned. Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) is steeped in the European tradition, renewing classical and Spanish drama. He also wrote the librettos for some of Richard Strauss’s operas (Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos) and adapted the English morality play Everyman as Jedermann, which is performed in Salzburg during the summer in front of the cathedral. Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931), like Hofmannsthal born in Vienna and like him contemporary of the likewise Viennese Sigmund Freud, excelled in the presentation of subtle psychological give and take in a series of scenes that make up Anatol. In Reigen (La Ronde) only one of the lovers connects the scene to the next in circular fashion. The play, which questions prevailing moral codes, caused a scandal when first performed. The following playwrights from this time period are usually associated with Expressionism, a movement that distorts reality so as to create images that reflect the author’s visions: Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), Georg Kaiser (1878–1945), and Ernst Toller (1893–1939).

Brecht The most famous and talented German playwright of the twentieth century is Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956). He collaborated with the composer Kurt Weill (1900–50) in the internationally acclaimed Dreigroschenoper (Three-Penny Opera), which is based on John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. ‘‘Mackie Messer’’ (‘‘Mac the Knife’’) became its most popular melody. As a Marxist, Brecht had to leave Nazi Germany. He wrote his best plays in exile, ending up in the United States before returning to the German Democratic Republic after the war. Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Mother Courage and Her Children) has the strong-willed, crafty mother trying to survive the Thirty Years War with her three children but losing every one of them. At the end she has to pull the sutler’s cart by herself. Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (Mister Puntila and his Man Matti) portrays the wealthy landowner Puntila as a kind and generous man only when he is drunk, which is often, but extremely mean when sober. Matti finally leaves such

German Drama a master. Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (The Caucasian Chalk Circle) has a prelude in which land use is changed so as to make it more productive. In the play itself the bad mother, representing capitalism, loses her child when the judge, in a reversal of Solomon’s verdict, decides that the child will be better cared for by the simple maid who has risked her life in saving that of the child. In Leben des Galilei the Renaissance scientist is shown with both his positive and negative sides. Brecht called his later plays epic theater in which a narrator, songs, and other nonrealistic features kept the audience from totally identifying with the character. By such ‘‘Verfremdungseffekt’’ (alienation effects) he expected the spectator not only to enjoy the performance but also to look critically at the actions of the various characters. The vacuum created by World War I was filled first by two Swiss authors. Max Frisch’s (1911–92) plays deal with issues relating to National Socialism, often in a parabolic manner. In Als der Krieg zu Ende war (When the War Was Over) the relationship between a Soviet colonel and the wife of a participant in the massacre of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto is explored. Biedermann und die Brandstifter (The Firebugs) makes us aware of how we close our eyes, out of cowardice, in the face of impending disaster. Andorra tells of racial prejudices, specifically anti-Semitism, when people find Jewish traits in a boy and kill him even though he is not Jewish. Friedrick Du¨rrenmatt (1921–90), another Swiss author, used the grotesque and satire in a series of successful plays. Best known and often produced is Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit). The wealthiest woman of the world, very much advanced in age, visits her home town to take revenge on her one-time lover who had betrayed her so as to marry a girl with better prospects. She promises the townspeople millions if they would bring about justice, i.e., ‘‘take care of her former lover,’’ an offer they cannot resist. We are so shocked by the outcome because we are all materialists. Die Physiker (The Physists) deals with the moral responsibility of the scientist, in this case with attempts to preserve the secrecy of atomic research. In Germany Peter Weiss (1916–82), who spent part of the Hitler period in Sweden, based Die Ermittlung, Oratorium in 11 Gesa¨ ngen (The Investigation, Oratorio in 11 Cantos) on statements made by witnesses at the Auschwitz concentration camp trial and thus brings into the open the horrors committed. The most esteemed playwright of the former German Democratic Republic is Heiner Mu¨ller (1929–95) who wrote, in collaboration with his wife, Inge Mu¨ller, ¨ cker (The Wage Cutter), which is based on an actual incident. Der Lohnd U The play delves into the problems of production quotas in a socialist economy. The Austrian Peter Handke (b. 1942) caused quite a stir with his Publikumsbeschimpfung (Offending the Audience), which is anti-theater at its best in that it attacks the values of traditional theater and audiences. Handke based his Kaspar on the nineteenth century foundling Kaspar Hauser. The play is

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Western Drama through the Ages concerned with language and truth, with the protagonist finding out that meaning is arbitrary.

RETROSPECT AND OUTLOOK In looking at the history of German drama one should not forget that it developed within a European context. Especially noticeable was the influence of classical models, but there were also French, English—Shakespeare being the most influential—and other European dramatists who played a role in what German playwrights wrote and how they shaped the texts. One should also note that while this chapter has focused on the plays of such well-known authors as Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller, two dramatists were actually more popular in their time, not only in Germany but also elsewhere, including the United States: August Wilhelm Iffland (1759–1814) and August Kotzebue (1761–1819). Music is an international language. Thus, opera lovers got to know, and still do so, plays by Schiller, Goethe, Bu¨chner, and others since their texts provided the basis for the librettos of many operas. When looking at the subject matter taken up by the various playwrights, one notices the frequency of the topic of the wronged woman, beginning with Lessing’s Emilia Galotti, and appearing again in Du¨rrenmatt’s Der Besuch der alten Dame. In Du¨rrenmatt’s play passivity has clearly changed to the woman’s taking control of the action. Another topic is the clash between the individual and his or her rights and the interest of the state. One can also see that the exceptional individual forms the center of the earlier period. Bu¨chner’s Woyzeck points to the later period since the two unexceptional protagonists no longer have freedom of choice but are subject to forces beyond their control, forces that bring about suffering. Hauptmann’s Die Weber is an example of the drama without protagonists. Up to the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century German princes supported the theaters at their courts, a tradition that the larger cities and the states later took over. Thus, there were, and still are, relatively few private theaters. Only recently has the support for the public theaters been cut back. That fact, as well as the apparent dearth of major new playwrights, has made for an uncertain future. It seems that the theater has lost much of its vitality and with it much of the importance it once had in the German cultural scene.

FURTHER READING Brandt, George W. German and Dutch Theatre, 1600–1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 Harding, James and Christoph Schweitzer, eds. German Writers in the Age of Goethe, 1789–1832. Munich: Thompson/Gale, 1989. Schweitzer, Christoph, Men Viewing Women as Art Objects. Ontario: Camden House, 1998.


Modern Indian Drama Sitanshi Talati-Parikh

BACKGROUND The arts in India are as rich as her cultural heritage, passed down for centuries, since the advent of civilization. Replete with diverse cultures, religions, philosophies, sects, languages, and people, India’s diversity is exemplified in her arts. From ancient classical Sanskrit epics and text to modern Indian languages, including English, Indian theater is vibrant with dimensions ranging from religious, didactic, realistic, political, social, the tamaasha and particularly the natya shashtra, which is a deeply rooted Indian theater form passed down through the ages. Music and dance have always played an integral role in all forms of the arts in India—from deified gods and goddesses, to sculpture, paintings, and movies, and of course, live in the theater. Kerala (a state in South India) theater distinguished itself by the importance it gave to actual acting and the use of gestures in lieu of the spoken language. This formed the crux of the entertainment value: educational, religious, and aesthetic, following upon the classical belief that dances not only help dramatic action, but also beautify it. India has a rich tradition of the epics, scriptures, and classical texts, in part lifestories of the gods and in-part a treatise on the ‘‘right’’ way of life, conforming to ethical, moral, social, religious and spiritual obligations of man. Many modernday plays still draw upon the rich material of the classics and epics. It shows a continuity of tradition, through time, following upon the fact that Indian society, though increasingly modern, is still deeply rooted in tradition, especially in the rural areas.

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Western Drama through the Ages Though parts of modern India have given recognition to their playwrights, many dramatists often lapsed into obscurity. Some indigenous playwrights were idolized at home, and others like Satyajit Ray, were ignored until successful in the West. Ray gained true recognition at home only after The World of Apu did well in London and New York. Rabindranath Tagore was one of the playwrights who was considered ‘‘prophetic’’ both at home and overseas. Indian drama is a collection of themes and ideas, often reaching to the classical myths and legends for inspiration and often drawing from sordid reality and realistic situations. Religion, politics, social and cultural issues, marriage, and history all play integral parts in the thematic substance of these plays. Issues of women and their role in society are seen in most plays either directly or in the background. With the advent of modernization and urban development also came the ensuing discontentment, angst, and existential dilemmas. Most of the writers discussed below write in their local or regional language, all of which have been translated into English. Mahesh Dattani, Gurcharan Das, Manjula Padmanabhan, Asif Currimbhoy, Partap Sharma, Shiv Subramaniam, Rahul da Cunha, and Tanika Gupta are among the Indian playwrights writing in English. Most of these writers are prolific, with many works to their credit. It would not be possible in the scope of this essay to cover all the writers and all their works, so a selection has been made to choose some of the dominant themes, and the writers following up on them.

STYLES OF INDIAN DRAMA The selection of Indian dramatists shows a wide range of styles and themes from realistic, ‘‘man-made’’ plays, to plays based on myth, legend and history. There have been distinct influences of European dramatists such as Shakespeare, Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, and classical Greek and Restoration drama among others. Contemporary Indian drama such as the plays of Badal Sircar (Evam Indrajit), Chandrasekhar Kambar (Siri Sampige), Shanta Gokhale (Avinash), Manjula Padmanabhan (Lights Out) and Satish Alekar (Mahapoor) show some absurdist elements and often ask existential questions. The concept of time and place is greatly challenged by various dramatists, with openness for experimentation like Mahesh Dattani’s multi-sets and layered scenes. Experimenting with multi-level staging, moving back and forth in time to create a kaleidoscopic montage effect in drama all work exceedingly well for Dattani. He also shows a great liking for dance and music, whether in the background or directly linked to the setting. With the multi-level staging, often with each stage depicting a different time and place—playing with the concepts of past, present, and future, one finds conversations overlapping and flowing into each other, with underlying metaphorical implications.

Modern Indian Drama Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit also moves back and forth in time, with a blending stream of consciousness that has implied meaning, while Datta Bhagat’s Whirlpool depicts a cyclical and stagnant nature of time and society, through generations. Many playwrights, such as Badal Sircar (in Evam Indrajit), Girish Karnad (Hayavadana) and Arun Mukherjee (Mareech, The Legend), have explored the concept of a play-within-a-play. Often the audience’s presence is acknowledged by the characters or narrator, in plays such as Panikkar’s The Lone Tusker and Karnad’s Hayavadana. The narrator or the sutra-dhar plays an important role in Indian drama. In fact, traditionally (especially in South Indian theater) a performer could spend hours illuminating lines of text, through analogies, associations, and background information. One play performance could last for days, with this form of elaboration on the original script. Often plays carried historical, mythical, and legendary meaning and references, and the stories were often familiar to the audience; therefore the significance of the performance was to elaborate and explore the familiar in greater depth. The narrator could also be a character in the play, and one can note instances when the narrator steps in and out of character in many contemporary plays. Playwrights like Gurcharan Das (Mira and 9 Jhakhoo Hill), Badal Sircar (Evam Indrajit), Girish Karnad ‘‘Hayavadana), K. N. Panikkar (Aramba Chekkan and The Lone Tusker), and Chandrasekhar Kambar (Siri Sampige), G.P Deshpande (Roads) among others, have followed upon the traditional role of the narrator, and some of them in experimental forms. In Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit, the writer is the narrator-cum-philosopher, and is involved in the play, attempting to create a plot as the play goes along. At times, the writer is all the male characters: Amal, Vimal, Kamal, and Indrajit. They all blend into one another signifying imitative and indistinctive characters given birth by society’s quelling of the individual. Girish Karnad’s play Hayavadana is based on myths and gods, and the people on the ‘‘outside’’ look upon everything with skepticism steeped in reality. The narrator becomes the bridge between the two worlds: myth and reality. In Kambar’s Siri Sampige the narrator takes on the role of the soothsayer, while in Mukherjee’s Mareech, the Legend, the characters refuse to let the play come to its ordained conclusion, by arguing with the narrator. Gurcharan Das’s Mira draws deeply upon the original legend or story of Mira, the Bhakti saint as an inspiration. Song and dance form an integral part of the performance of this one-act play, with a unique style of narration. The onlookers talk about the scene on stage in a stream-of-consciousness fashion. The scene and the discussion of the scene all blend into one continuous dialogue, which is quick, flippant and with a fluid motion of its own. Das’s 9 Jhakhoo Hill also bears a narrator who is a part of the story and is also a prominent character. Here the

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Western Drama through the Ages narrator, Karan, at times talks about his own character as if looking at himself from the outside. All major contemporary dramatists have used song, dance, poetry, and music liberally, some showing distinct Western influences. The use of Western music in the background is one such example. Examples of plays that incorporate song and dance are Mareech, the Legend, Mira, The Lone Tusker and Aramba Chekkan. Partap Sharma’s A Touch of Brightness starts of with poetry, which could be a sardonic take on Frost’s ‘‘Road Not Taken.’’ Many other playwrights like Mahesh Dattani employ some sort of music in the background, to set the mood and plot. Influenced in part by classical Sanskrit drama, Rabindranath Tagore had been proclaimed the pathfinder of modern Indian drama. Tagore, disillusioned by the restrictions of the spoken word, was fascinated with song and dance in drama. In fact he even reworked dances into some of his older plays. His later music dramas began to show a greater focus on dances. From verse dramas and prose plays to farce and ‘‘riddle plays,’’ from lyrical plays to ‘‘symbolical’’ plays, and from dance-drama to season plays, Tagore has attempted a variety of styles. His use of symbolism in his later plays and invention of genres such as the dancedrama and season-drama created a new phase in Indian drama, without giving up on the traditionality of Indian theater. Tagore was a great experimenter with stagecraft. Interplay of color to denote mood is just one example of his theater, which is considered a work of art. His later plays began to have simpler, more minimalistic settings as opposed to his earlier realistic and naturalistic settings.

EPICS, CLASSICS, MYTHS, LEGENDS, AND HISTORY The Indian classical texts, ancient legends and myths, historical figures, and revered epics have influenced many playwrights. They have used these texts and legends as a mode of inspiration, allegory, metaphors, classical values, and characterization. Story telling is an old Indian art form. The playwrights take up on the concept, while creating specific identities and themes for the stories. Tagore is an example of a prolific and renowned writer who was also influenced by Indian and Hindu mythology, as seen in his plays like Formless Jewel. Eminent Hindi writer Mohan Rakesh’s One Day in Ashadha takes up the story of Kalidasa, the great Indian poet, whose love and inspiration withers in his absence and quest for fame. The humility of a small rural town is contrasted to the ostentatiousness and pretensions of a princely court. Malayalam playwright K. N. Panikkar considers theater to be visual poetry, and was influenced by Sanskrit drama and Kerala mythology. The characters in his plays are personifications of themes and ideas such as death, life, nature, love, and destruction, and he creates deep metaphorical meaning in the dialogue.

Modern Indian Drama Girish Karnad, writing in Kannada, also takes up on myth and folk themes. In Hayavadana, one of the first modern Indian plays using traditional performance to receive national attention, Karnad blends Indian folk elements with classical performance, showing elements of myth, religion, and ritualism. In The Fire and the Rain, he uses the ritualistic practices of the Brahmins to depict the mythical implications on the cosmos. Chandrasekhar Kambar, a leading playwright in Kannada, also uses myth and superstition, deities, and ritualistic sacrifices in his Siri Sampige, which takes the form of a Shakespearean-style tragedy, with a soothsayer, a prophecy and its fulfillment, court jesters, the tragedy of the prince, and villains plotting in the background. The lives of princes and commoners are often alike, both fighting over a woman. Reminiscent of Macbeth’s prophecies, the prophecy in this play also eventually comes true, signing off on a note of finality about fate and destiny. Bengali playwright Arun Mukherjee in Mareech, the Legend has also based his play on myth, legend, and the famous Indian epic, Ramayana. He stylistically he uses the same basic story and shows different times, places and characters, depicting the relevance of the story even today. He uses scenes from modern times contrasted with similar scenes from the epic and legend. He even uses a scene based in American politics and with American characters. In conclusion he brings in all the characters from different times and even brings in the writer of the Ramayana, Valmiki, as a character, where reality and myth all combine into one argumentative scene about the ending, with the characters attempting to change the ‘‘pre-ordained’’ ending. In Aurangzeb, Indira Parthasarathi, a Tamil writer, takes up the true historical story of a Mughal ruler, Aurangzeb, and uses it to draw out the religious tensions that existed and festered since the time of the Mughal conquest of India. It brings to life the stories of his father and king, Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal; and Shah Jahan’s obsessive need to build expensive and beautiful monuments, at the cost of an impoverished nation. He is contrasted to Aurangzeb, the son who never got a father’s love, who despised his father’s weaknesses and excesses, and who felt that India should be ruled with a firm hand. The contrasting characters of his two sisters, and the decisions of his brother have all been described with a moving and skillful hand. Parthasarathi has developed lifelike characters from historical figures. His characterization is multi-dimensional, where the audience simultaneously empathizes with and disapproves of, likes and dislikes a character. Once more, one finds hints of Shakespearean tragedy, with the red stain on the hands that refuses to wash off, suggestive of Macbeth. The herd mentality of the masses is discussed, just as in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The ubiquitous question of religion in politics is as relevant in today’s political arena as it was before.

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COLONIAL ISSUES It is noteworthy that the first ‘‘modern’’ play in India was enacted in Calcutta towards the end of the eighteenth century. The play was in English and was directed by a European. The new theater was written and staged in the shadow and wake of the British rule in India. In fact, after independence in 1947, modern Indian drama had a deep sense of the West and its ensuing modernity in drama, while reminiscing about the classics, tradition, and the ethnic. Toward the 1960s came the audience’s real awareness of the role of the director and production. The director’s auteur came into play since plays were written in the local language, and then translated and performed in English and other local Indian languages. This enabled the writers to reach out to wider audiences, and foster greater experimentation in theater. The last century of Indian theater is a blend of the ancient (Indian) and the modern (European). Post-colonial India and a multi-cultural West have both displayed a need for a contemporary cultural expression, where the cultural mingling of the East and the West can take place on a common ground. Writing in English, Mahesh Dattani, Gurcharan Das, and Tanika Gupta, among others, have taken this aspect of Indian drama up to give a voice to a new cultural expression and collaboration. Gurcharan Das provides a fascinating range and style of work, while writing in English. He believes that the play is primarily for the audience (as opposed to the readers). There is a distinct influence of myth, history, the epics, and legend in his work, yet his handling of these themes is not heavy-handed but has a natural sense of continuity and flow. He also shows an influence of traditional Greek drama. Larins Sahib, staged at the time the British East India Company was colonizing India, is actually written from a pseudo-British perspective, where the Indians are ‘‘natives.’’ The play also surveys the British cavalier attitude toward India, and the roots of colonialism. Das uses the art of witty parlance: back and forth dialogue where wit, philosophy, and intelligence uncover deeper aspects of each character and situation, with every exchange. 9 Jhakhoo Hill goes back in reference to the partition of independent India and of the ensuing disruption of families, where the partition of India is likened to a partition of the mind. Moving ahead in time, it brings out the rise of the middle class in India, one that is ‘‘new money,’’ professionals that are crass, street-smart, and racing to get ahead, as opposed to the withering generation of the old rich families that have stature and class, but not the street-smart grit required to push ahead; where the past is being taken over by the future, and the people living in the past are struggling to hold on. The younger generation is at times weak and stifled by an elitist bourgeoisie society, at other times striving to ride to the top with independence and drive. The internal turmoil of the family serves as a metaphor for the Indo-Chinese war raging in the political arena of the

Modern Indian Drama time. Gurcharan Das’s plays describe the consequences of political decisions at the social level, and the changing aspects of Indian society over time, with the rooted influences of colonialism.

REGIONAL ISSUES Regional issues play as important a role (if not more) as national issues in modern Indian drama. Marathi playwrights, for instance, writing from and about the state of Maharashtra, whose capital is Bombay (or Mumbai), are seen to concentrate on regional issues that affect their society and people. Most choose to write in their regional language as opposed to Hindi or English, though their works have, in most cases, been translated to English. They look to address the people directly in their social milieu in order to effect social change. Regional writers like Maharashtrians and Bengalis (among others) have been fighting for social justice, especially for the lower castes, against the rigid caste system prevalent in Hindu society. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar was the social revolutionary idolized by most Maharashtrians for his work in bringing about a change in society. From there arose what was called Dalit Sahitya, Marathi writing taking a social stand against injustices, especially towards the lower class (and castes) and the untouchables, and striving to create awareness among others. Marathi dramatists have been prolific, and notable among them are Vijay Tendulkar, G.P. Deshpande, Mahesh Elkunchwar, Satish Alekar, Datta Bhagat, Shanta Gokhale, Rajiv Naik, and Achyut Vaze. Many of these dramatists had a strong socio-political agenda.

POLITICAL ISSUES G.P. Deshpande was a leading Marxist intellectual, whose plays are notable for their deep political themes, exploring the threat to ideology, impact on people (and their relationships), the collapse of the communist ideal, and the angst and emptiness associated with this loss of belief. Past One O’clock brings out the communist politics in India, with patriarchy in politics, and a confrontation between generations and ideological positions, cultures and temperaments. It discusses the history of the Marxist-communist movement in India (India is a socialist democracy, with a smaller socialist-communist political party contesting in a multi-party political arena). In Roads he gives contemporary reality the status of an epic, and brings out his customary questions on political standing and the status of society with all its ills. He contrasts the democracy and life of the West, which he finds imperialistic and materialistic, against the communism of the Soviet Union and the religious fundamentalism that pervades the Subcontinent. There is a deep sense of loss, of faith, religion, and belief in society and government that pervades Deshpande’s works. His is a call for reform, for a better

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Western Drama through the Ages way of life, freedom from the hackles of society and government, and the ability to choose your own road in life. Whether historical or political, Deshpande’s plays analyze the individual entangled and struggling in dark times, the dilemma and connection between the personal and the political. He has been said to have created the genre of the play of ideas or the intellectual play in Marathi. Mother of 1084 is a heartrending play by eminent Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, tackling the issues of Dalit political uprising, the revolutionary spirit, and the death of a son at the hands of a government that cracks down on uprisings. The mother’s pain and need for answers is contrasted against the rest of the family’s lack of involvement and the need to move on. The concept of the living who are dead in spirit and the dead who live on in spirit is very strong throughout the play. Datta Bhagat’s Routes and Escape Routes and Whirlpool follow upon the Dalit Sahitya movement in Marathi Drama. The former, while describing three generations involved in the movement, and each generation’s take on it, from non-violence to extremist and revolutionary, brings out the ideas of social change, unity and living with conflicting points of view. Whirlpool is a play within a play, with scenes resembling Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, where there is a sort of metaphorical time travel, alternating as a comment on the present situation and the cyclical nature of society. From one generation to another there is no change— father, son, grandson all are ‘‘victims’’ of society. It also takes up the concurrent themes of casteism and social revolution. Asif Currimbhoy’s Inquilab (Revolution) deals with the Naxalite revolution, where agrarian communists choose violent methods to solve their problems. There are people set against the revolution, all of them with their own personal dilemmas: the dilemma of the poor peasant, the local government, the professor and the husband and wife. Currimbhoy considered this play to be the nightmare and redemption of today’s Calcutta. His other plays also take up on political themes; for example, The Captives talks about the Indo-China conflict of 1962 and The Refugee is about entering into Bangladesh in 1971.

RELIGIOUS ISSUES Religion in India is at once a divisive and unifying force. With a myriad of religions coexisting in a secular nation, there are bound to be conflicts and issues, often incited by the militant factions of the religions and by political manipulations. It is therefore inevitable that literature and drama would carry deep reverberations of these themes. Religious issues are not a new theme in India, as Indira Parthasarathi’s Aurangzeb tells us about the religious tensions existing since historical times with the advent of the Mughal invasion of India, and the coming of Islam, which brought about religious tensions between the Hindus and Muslims.

Modern Indian Drama Rabindranath Tagore’s plays like Natir Puja show his interest in Buddhism’s equality as opposed to the inequalities and rigidities of Hinduism. Datta Bhagat (in Routes and Escape Routes) and Deshpande talk about the differences between the elitist Hindu Brahmins, and the adopted Buddhist faith of the Dalits. In Deshpande’s Roads, different characters adopt representative ideas on religion. Kachubhai discusses the impact of Islamic fundamentalism on Hindus, and in turn, their fundamentalist reactions; and he believes that extremism in any form leads to destruction. His is a call for a positive attitude towards all faiths, rather than a critique of others. Gokhale is proud of his country’s roots and traditions and talks about Hindutva (the Hindu faith) while Gangadhar takes a communist stance. Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions talks about communal hatred, a pervasive aspect of Indian society, where multiple religious beliefs strive to coexist in mutual harmony, but militant factions create constant threats to peace. The mob or the herd reminds one of Shakespeare’s mindless mob, and it is symbolic here of each individual’s own simmering sentiments that translate into religious hatred and hysteria. The mob is described as attempting to have a voice of its own, and yet getting clamped down and swayed by the strongest opinion. From an individual it becomes one incensed and destructive mass. It depicts the reality of politicians in India using the vulnerability of the masses and playing on their fears and sentiments. Interracial or interreligious marriage has traditionally been frowned upon by society, and writers such as Tanika Gupta in Hobson’s Choice and Vijay Tendulkar in Kamala touch upon this topic.

SOCIAL ISSUES Originally writing in Bengali, Rabindranath Tagore was driven by an intense social motivation in his later works, with a desire to liberate Indian society from the evils of the caste system and other rigidities imposed by Hinduism. His plays like Guru and Rath-yatra parody the unorthodox beliefs of Hinduism and argue the inequalities of the Hindu caste system. Bansari is another example of his preoccupation with society: witty conversation replacing warmth and sentiments in upper class Calcutta society. Marathi writer, Satish Alekar’s Mahapoor (The Deluge) is a dark, absurdist tale of a young man running the thin line between sanity and insanity, a tale of murder and the questioning of reality amidst the societal setting of sectarianism and the familial setting of rigidly ingrained patriotism against a bloody revolution. In The Wooden Cart, which was originally written in Hindi, Tripurari Sharma discusses the social stigma of being ‘‘diseased’’ in society, where leprosy is used as a metaphor for all other kinds of social stigma.

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Western Drama through the Ages Also writing in Hindi, Surendra Verma takes up the theme of adultery in a royal household in From Sunset to Sunrise and its social acceptance when the man is impotent and the woman is publicly given a chance to impregnate herself with another man, to give birth to an heir. The torment of the husband who faces the shame and the pain of watching his wife choose another man is contrasted against the shame of the woman who has to perform this ritual. The twist in the sordid tale comes when the woman starts enjoying her sexual freedom as opposed to living with an impotent husband. The wrenching soliloquy of an impotent man brings out a theme not touched upon often: a man tormented by his wife’s actions imposed and condoned by society. Mahesh Dattani takes up on the topic of the hijras (eunuchs) and their place in society in Seven Steps Around the Fire. Relegated to begging and accepting alms at weddings and births in return for good wishes, these people are ostracized from society. Uma, a sociologist, chooses to write her research paper on them and uncovers a shocking story of the love between an upper-class man and a hijra, which eventually leads to their deaths. The police and the family manage to hush up the story and no arrests are made, which is a lasting reminder of how many unprivileged people in society still have no voice of redress. Vijay Tendulkar has been heralded as one of the most exemplary Marathi dramatists. He describes social problems, complexity of human relationships entwined with deep questionings of morality, which in turns brings out the reality of the role of women, and a critique of modern society in India. There is a reevaluation of moral values and social injustice associated with middle-class morality. Within the deeply rooted casteism and socio-economic divisions, each social class in turn looks down upon the other. In Sakharam Binder, Laxmi, who is thrown out of her own home and ostracized, in turn looks down upon Champa’s immorality. Mistreatment, hatred, and even murder take place, all in the name of false morality and misplaced values. In Vultures, the only thread of humanity that exists is within an illicit relationship, which also withers away under the pressure of morality and the dearth of humanity around it, portraying the moral and economic disintegration of the family. Tendulkar’s characters are victims of society and middle-class morals and values, along with the rigidly pervasive patriarchal society that likens women to slaves and makes them subservient to men.

Casteism Casteism, class and sectarian differences still play a major role in themes for Indian drama. The Fire and the Rain by eminent Kannada playwright Girish Karnad, takes a critical view of the caste system. A young ‘‘hunter’’ girl Nittilai questions everyone’s blind beliefs and reverence of the upper class Hindu Brahmins, of the various gods worshipped by Hindus and of the oppressive needs for rites and rituals in religious belief, imposed by the Brahmins. Karnad shows

Modern Indian Drama how a ‘‘low’’ hunter girl has more honor, righteousness, and morality than an upper-class Brahmin. Usha Ganguli’s Rudali also serves to mock the caste system, and describes lower caste women dealing with upper caste injustices and discrimination. Datta Bhagat deals with the conflict between the Dalits and the Hindus, and their differing perspectives and ideologies. The universal phenomenon of the downtrodden in society is taken on through their characters and stories. In Bengali playwright Utpal Dutt’s Hunting The Sun, the setting is historical, but the relevance of issues brought up are valid even today. He brings out the caste issues of the Shudras (untouchables) and the imposed Brahminical code. His questions are haunting: freedom for the ‘‘slaves’’ leads to a breakdown in society, as there would be no one willing or forced to do the menial tasks required. The Shudras are not allowed to read, think, or grow. That is not their place in society, as ordained by the Brahmins. This is the quandary that most upper class people are left with—they refuse to create true freedom for the downtrodden, so that they can maintain the selfish status quo of society. Questions of science are also disregarded as heretical to religion, and the people who believe in science above a blind faith in religion are slaughtered. Just as in modern politics, the politics of the rulers in the play brings out their need for lies and force to keep their people in order. The fight here is about faith: in reason or religion, the fight against superstition and blind beliefs that enslave people, and the resilience and strength of a poor Shudra woman, who is tortured but refuses to give up her beliefs.

Family Issues For traditional Indian society, the family is above all else. Drawing upon a tradition of a close-knit, joint family, the themes in a majority of the plays are linked to families and their power over each other. At what point does one draw the line between the welcome warmth of a family and domination and interference in one’s life? Dattani’s Tara had to face the consequences of her family’s ruthless decision all her life. In Dance Like A Man, Dattani’s Jairaj tries to go against the traditional Indian joint-family system. Tendulkar’s The Vultures describes a family’s economic and moral degeneration at their own hands. Hema and Satish in Bhagat’s Routes and Escape Routes choose to have an inter-caste marriage, and are ostracized by their family. In Tripurari Sharma’s The Wooden Cart, a leper is abandoned and ostracized by his family and society because no one wants to ‘‘deal’’ with the problem. In Shanta Gokhale’s Avinash, a family keeps their problematic family member locked inside a room, and attempts to carry on a regular life. Tanika Gupta in The Waiting Room and Mahesh Dattani in Where There’s A Will both take up the concept of one family member who is dead, but plays a role as a character that the audience can see and hear, and one who looks at his or her family and realizes what they think, how they react, their dilemmas and their true

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WOMEN IN INDIAN DRAMA Women in Indian society have been in turn deified and worshipped, respected and considered the ‘‘wealth’’ of a family, and on the flip side have been considered ‘‘below’’ men, forced into servitude, bought, sold, and murdered by society (female infanticide and Sati). Many dramatists have brought out the troubling status of women, their exploitation and their role in society. While urban India has progressed greatly in emancipating women, many rural areas continue to carry on age-old patriarchal practices. Partap Sharma’s A Touch of Brightness describes the transition of an enlightened temple dancer Prema to a beggar, who is sold against her will to a whore house and becomes Rukhmani, a girl striving to increase her spiritual knowledge amidst her enforced profession of prostitution. Badal Sircar, a Bengali playwright, touches on the subservience of women in Evam Indrajit. G.P. Deshpande’s Vasundhara in Passage to Darkness is trying to find herself. In Verma’s From Sunset to Sunrise, Sheelvati has to come to terms with society-imposed adultery, because of an impotent husband. Utpal Dutt’s Hunting the Sun describes the inspiring story of an enlightened Shudra woman, Indrani, whose resilience and strength of character condemns her to torturous death, but also manages to convert a ruthless warrior into a changed man. Mahesh Dattani’s Tara, in Tara, is a young girl who is loved just a little less than her twin brother and who is unknowingly used as a scapegoat to better her brother’s life, by her parents. Yet there is a sense of forgiveness and tolerance in her behavior along with a latent confusion about the discrimination. Dattani in fact sees the play as being about the gendered self, where Tara and Dan (her twin) are metaphorically and symbolically two personalities of the same self. The story is written with her brother as the narrator, a touching tribute to a girl that is a victim of her family’s (and through them modern society’s) need to continue to empower the male over the female. Tanika Gupta, writing in English, based out of England, talks about the liberation of women from their traditional roles in her plays. Inside Out which was commissioned by Clean Break for women in prison, talks about a better life for women who have the determination to overcome their circumstances. Hobson’s Choice, an Indian adaptation of the original Harold Brighouse play, portrays determination, grit, independence, and a keen sense of survival in the form of the protagonist Durga (symbolically the name of an Indian goddess that battles evil). In a subversive twist, the conservative male head of the family, Durga’s father, is entirely dependent on her to better his life, just like Durga’s husband Ali. This play brings out the reliance men have on the women in the house, though

Modern Indian Drama they may refuse to acknowledge it. On a similar note, but with a very different story and style, Mahesh Dattani’s Where There’s A Will shows the underlying strength of Hasmukh Mehta’s wife and mistress and their ability to understand each other and Mehta’s weakness. Mehta dies thinking he was infallible and supreme, and the reality of his weakness comes through the people he attempted to control. Vijay Tendulkar describes the reality of middle and lower class women. In Silence! The Court Is In Session Benare is condemned by society for an illicit relationship, but no one condemns the man for his actions toward her. No man steps up to help her and the biggest irony is that women also do not step up for her; instead, they are equally vicious and quick in pointing fingers. In Sakharam Binder, Laxmi, Champa, and many others are all just housekeepers and servants for their men. Tendulkar goes as far as to point out the reality of the status of women, in Kamla. A lower-class adivasi (tribal) woman, Kamla, and an educated, well-to-do woman Sarita, despite being in largely different economic circumstances, live in the same social atmosphere, where in reality both are just ‘‘slaves’’ of men. In keeping with the expected norm, and the resilience and loyalty of an Indian woman, Sarita, despite her misery and sense of awakening, stays with her man in his time of need. Tendulkar’s Sarita is reminiscent of Ibsen’s Nora in A Doll’s House. Datta Bhagat in Routes and Escape Routes sees an educated woman treated condescendingly by an uncle she still shows respect and concern for. Usha Ganguli (writing in Hindi) in Rudali (adapted from Mahasweta Devi’s book) describes the economic survival of a poor woman without a male in the family, and the solidarity of spirit of a woman amidst abject poverty. Malini Bhattacharya has depicted the women’s movement in India through her Bengali street plays: Giving Away the Girl and The Monkey Dance that are protesting the dowry system, and Why All This Bloodshed? is about a Muslim woman’s rights, following upon the Shah Bano case in the mid-1980s. Gurcharan Das explores the woman as an inspiration, as a legend, as a lover, and as a multi-dimensional person in Mira. Mira was originally a Bhakti saint, and had many devotees and followers. His play describes her legendary journey into sainthood. Dealing with the ‘‘place’’ of a woman and her ‘‘appropriate’’ behavior in society, his Mira is unconventional and the nontraditional woman, wrapped in a cloak of tradition. Continuing his positive attitude towards women, in 9 Jhakhoo Hill, Das brings out the strength and resilience in Ansuya, who takes on the difficult task of supporting her family as opposed to following love and independence. Rabindranath Tagore also had deep faith in the feminine principle. His works depict a deep understanding and observance of and empathy toward women and their role in society. He considered Woman to be nature’s beauty,

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URBAN ISSUES Shanta Gokhale and Mahesh Elkunchwar pick up on the urban angst, while writing in Marathi. Others like Manjula Padmanabhan and Mahesh Dattani write in English, and continue the existential quest for a semblance of humanity in a contemporary urban lifestyle. They choose a naturalistic mode, with plays set in a city apartment, where the characters are enmeshed in intense human dramas with mounting tensions, eruptive situations, unraveling relationships, and the general feeling of urban claustrophobia. Shanta Gokhale’s Avinash is a disturbing and intense drama of a family’s struggle to cope with the protagonist, Avinash, who is manic-depressive and an alcoholic. He is ostracized from society, excluded from the family and forced to remain hidden in a room for life, generating levels of oppressive tensions in the family’s social setting. Avinash’s presence is pervasive and intense, yet he remains invisible to the audience. In Mahesh Elkunchwar’s Party, the party represents the superficiality and pretentiousness of urban social gatherings. The ‘‘party’’ is a metaphor to fill up an intellectual and ideological void in urban India. The empty space is taken up by the ego of self-absorbed characters. Elkunchwar’s personal interest in Chekhov’s work is translated to his own style. Once more an invisible presence at the social gathering threatens to disrupt the semblance of normalness. The urban angst described in these plays draws from the subconscious fears, dilemmas, and insecurity associated with the controls society and other people have on individuals. Manjula Padmanabhan depicts the escapism, silence, and the lack of genuine concern that exists in an urban environment in her play, Lights Out. Every person lives simply to ensure his or her own well-being, and anything that threatens to mar that is determinedly ignored. The backdrop of the play has an invisible (to the audience) woman’s heartrending screams of anguish that can be heard night after night, and implications of her being gang-raped are discussed in the household, but the people steadfastly ignore her plight and find the whole thing ‘‘intrusive.’’ Rather than do something to help, out of a basic sense of decency and humanity, they wonder why the people involved in the crime cannot go somewhere else. There is truly a ‘‘light out’’ not just in the house, but also in humanity. Well-known Bengali playwright Badal Sircar’s Evam Indrajit is a depiction of the meaninglessness of life and its subsequent monotony, in an absurdist

Modern Indian Drama fashion. Time and life is cyclical to the point that one cannot differentiate between places, events, time, and people. Everything, including the characters, blends into each other, taking up each other’s identities, where clearly, being bound by society leads to a breakdown in independent thinking and being distinctive. Mahesh Dattani has a particularly strong sense of language and characterization. He superimposes strong characters on fundamental social issues and questions pervasive social norms. His characters come alive and are easily identifiable with an urban audience. He uses the dramatic structure to bring to life characters and stories that are real, bold and powerful. His settings are often as fragmented as the families and social scenarios he is depicting. Dattani’s plays have been said to blend the physical and spatial awareness of Indian theater with the textual precision of Western models like the theater of Ibsen or Tennessee Williams. Bravely Fought the Queen demonstrates how in a hypocritical society, acting is as real as reality. Under layers of drama, pretensions, and social masks lies the reality of social life, at the epicenter of which plays out human drama in its most anguished form. Dattani also brings out the concept of the traditional family in his plays—where generations of family members often live together, embrace and suffocate each other in turn. The past, present, and future all live together under one roof. Dattani picks up on themes like mixed religions and social caste marriage, a questioning of marriage from a gay person’s perspective, the issues of being ‘‘Indian’’ and ‘‘Indian-ness’’—abroad, and in India, finding oneself to be a social misfit, where one can either be gay or be Indian and being victims of society’s hypocritical expectations and norms. Dattani uses his characters to nudge society into a deeper questioning and a call for liberation from society-imposed norms. His On a Muggy Night in Mumbai is the first Indian play to openly handle themes of gay love and partnership. This cleverly laid out and moving tragic-comedy genuinely questions the hypocrisy of society. Others like Asif Currimbhoy and Tanika Gupta take on the reality of contemporary urban life with influences from the time spent abroad—Currimbhoy got his start writing in America. In The Hungry Ones, Currimbhoy creates some controversy discussing Allen Ginsberg’s trip to India—as the Indians saw it! The Doldrummers is about the doldrums that settle over a group of young people living in the suburbs of metropolitan Bombay. Tanika Gupta writes from England, and her plays take up on the social themes of the diaspora, and Indians living in a foreign country, having to blend in with a different culture, and the emancipation of women from their traditional roles as subservient to men, of interracial marriages and gay love.

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CONCLUSION India’s diversity at regional and national levels in terms of people, beliefs, languages, religions, culture, and history has created a unique kind of drama: multi-flavored and varied. Yet at the most basic level, all the predominant themes are common, all the writers address similar issues: society, culture, emancipation of women, political and economic conditions, historical influences, and the contemporary versus the traditional. At the very core, Indian drama is not that much different from drama in any other part of the world. Names, faces, and places change, but the themes are all the same, as relevant at the grassroots level as at a national or global level. There is unity in its diversity, openness in its conservatism, embracing of the modern and contemporary while fiercely upholding the traditional, a heartfelt call for socio-political change along with a deep sense of belief in the society’s resilience. Indian drama is a tribute to a nation that is diverse and able to open its arms to all.

FURTHER READING Dattani, Mahesh. City Plays: Party, Avinash, Lights Out. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004. Deshpande, G.P. 50 Years of India, China: Crossing a Bridge of Dreams. New Delhi: Tulika, 2001. Mee, Erin B., ed. Drama Contemporary: India. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.


Irish Drama Richard Rankin Russell

EARLY IRISH DRAMA: BEGINNINGS TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Largely because of the rural nature of Gaelic culture and polity, there was long thought to be no native tradition of drama in Ireland, a critical commonplace enabled by the lack of Irish language skills by critics working in the field that prevented them from reading Old Irish and Middle Irish works. Drama has traditionally ‘‘been a town art supported by fixed patronage,’’ and the Irish had no native towns, as one of the seminal critics of the early Irish theater, William S. Clark, has argued. Because of the founding of towns and cities in Ireland by successive waves of invaders such as the Danes, Normans, and English, ‘‘the history of the stage in Ireland,’’ Clark holds, ‘‘is the account of alien forces slowly molding and developing the natural theatrical instincts in the Irish genius’’. The early Irish great fairs may have included embryonic elements of drama, which became more developed in the acting that sprang up around Irish wakes. More recently, however, Alan J. Fletcher has argued that there was a native tradition of drama in the Gaelic performing arts that were performed in the context of feasts. Fletcher’s study of the seating etiquette in the medieval banqueting hall of Tara, first copied around the mid-twelfth century in the Book of Leinster, has shown that approximately ten of the social orders depicted are ‘‘members of the entertainer class most likely to create a festive context conducive to dramatic activity.’’ Based upon his extensive analysis of the function of these entertainers, coupled with his reading of various contemporary Gaelic texts, including Old Irish law tracts, Fletcher concludes that the presence of shouting jesters, acrobats, conjurers, gesticulating storytellers, jugglers, riddlers, farters, poetry reciters, and

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Western Drama through the Ages dancers, who consistently performed at banquets, constituted the first examples of early Irish drama, loosely defined. Additionally, ‘‘some Gaelic performing artists dressed in distinctive sorts of costumes and were organized into bands, some of which were [ . . .] touring troupes.’’ These actors were mostly men, but some women also would perform. Although surviving texts emphasize the actors’ role as satirists, they may also have danced. Significantly, Gaelic performing artists were perceived by the English as ‘‘seditious’’ and ‘‘oppositional,’’ and functioned as resistors of ‘‘the English colonial presence.’’ Clark points out other examples of early Irish drama, including the spread of miming from wakes to weddings and other joyful occasions, and the growing popularity of mumming, which was brought over by English settlers beginning in the fifteenth century and was performed on such pagan celebrations as May Day and such Christian ones as Christmas in County Cork and Wexford. The start of more formal drama in Ireland, however, began in urban churches with the miracle plays used by clergy for religious instruction, which were first dumb shows incorporated into services, then sung in Latin within the liturgy. Soon, miracle plays performed independently from the churches became popular, with most of them coming from England. In the second half of the fifteenth century, the city of Dublin had grown sufficiently that its trade guilds and city corporation began celebrating the Corpus Christi festival in late May or early June with an extravagant procession. By the end of this century, the city corporation and the Guild of St. George began staging another dramatic religious celebration, the Pageant of St. George’s Day. These processions were only done in dumb show, however, and never developed into the religious plays performed on church holidays as they did in such English cities as Chester and York. Clark suggests that the first ‘‘secular performance of regular drama in Dublin’’ came ‘‘during the vice-regency of Sir Henry Sidney’’ in 1569 with a dramatic production by the Dublin city corporation for the Lord Deputy at a banquet hall. By 1589, traveling dramatic troupes from England began arriving in Dublin and staging productions there and at Youghal in County Cork, southern Ireland. With the founding of Trinity College, Dublin in 1592, the college started performing Christmas plays by at least 1629. Another major dramatic site in addition to Dublin and Youghal was the walled town of Kilkenny, southwest of Dublin, which staged plays beginning in the mid-sixteenth century on both Corpus Christi and Midsummer Day, many of which were part of a Protestant effort to convert local Catholics. All of these early festivals, pageants, and plays were either performed by local amateurs or by traveling professional English players. Professional drama with local Irish actors in a permanent home began with the opening of the Werburgh Street Theatre in the fall of 1637 by the Scottish dancing master and publisher John Ogilby. Christopher Murray points out that ‘‘A plague in London during 1636–37 helped Ogilby’s recruiting of personnel, for at such

Irish Drama times the London theaters were officially closed and the actors and musicians had to look elsewhere for employment.’’ Ogilby also brought the English playwright James Shirley (1595–1666) to Dublin as a writer-in-residence for the Werburgh Street Theatre. This playhouse staged established plays from the London stage such as those by Jonson, Middleton, and Fletcher, along with some of Shirley’s own. Shirley’s new play, Saint Patrick for Ireland (1639) was the first modern play in English to premiere in Dublin. Saint Patrick features the saint’s Christian triumph over the dark Druids, implicitly suggesting the superiority of English rationality over Irish paganism and legitimizing the continuing English attempts to colonize the island. The only play known by an Irishman known to have been staged at the Werburgh Street Theatre was Henry Burnell’s Landgartha (1640), which featured a muddled mixture of a story from Danish history interspersed with Irish dancing. The major Irish theater to replace the one at Werburgh Street was The Theatre Royal, more commonly called ‘‘Smock Alley,’’ which opened in 1662 as the first Restoration theater in either England or Ireland. By the 1740s, Smock Alley rivaled the London playhouses at Drury Lane and Covent Garden for both popularity and excellence of production, and became such a training ground for local actors that soon Irish actors began bringing their talents to London. Unfortunately, the Smock Alley productions were often static performances of such imported drama as low English comedy, pantomime, and French dance, as Helen M. Burke has argued. Burke shows that before and after the tenure of Thomas Sheridan, who managed Smock Alley from 1745–58 and attempted to regulate and police the stage, a variety of unauthorized intruders satirized Smock Alley productions through pamphlets, participated in street ‘‘riots,’’ and even ventured onstage to disrupt performances. Sheridan and his supporters viewed such riotous performances as examples of the barbarous behavior of the local Irish, whom they often viewed as uncivilized and unsaved Catholics. These ‘‘actors,’’ as Burke suggests, came ‘‘from different positions in the social, political, and cultural spectrum of Irish life challenged hegemonic structures with their riotous performances and theatrical oppositions,’’ and transformed Irish theater into an egalitarian space freer from conformity to British dramatic strictures than it had been previously. Well-known Anglo-Irish playwrights from the period 1690 to 1800 include George Farquhar, whose Protestant planter family lost everything in the 1689 siege of Derry in what is modern-day Northern Ireland. Farquhar left Trinity College, Dublin for Smock Alley and became a professional actor, later leaving for London in 1698, where he wrote a series of comedies including The Beaux’ Stratagem (1707), drawing on his own life set in rural Ireland. Farquhar’s rural settings and penchant for drawing on his own life inspired later Anglo-Irish playwrights such as Sir Richard Steele, whose plays such as The Conscious Lovers

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Western Drama through the Ages (1722) were usually romantic comedies, written in reaction to the realism of Restoration comedies of manners; Oliver Goldsmith, whose most famous work, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), typifies his dislike of sentimental comedy; and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, whose plays such as The Rivals (1775) and The School for Sandal (1777) affirm true love within the context of traditional comedies of manners.

MODERN IRISH DRAMA For the vast part of the nineteenth century Irish theater was virtually moribund. The melodramas and mannered comedies of Dion Boucicault (1820–90) in the latter half of the century proved popular with audiences, yet Boucicault often recycled and reified the stereotypes associated with the Stage Irishman, a caricature given to a violent temper and hyperbolic speech. While the social satirists Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and George Bernard Shaw (1854–1950) enjoyed great success on the London stage in the 1890s (and Shaw for many more decades after that), neither playwright treated Irish themes in any depth, save for Shaw in his John Bull’s Other Island (1904). Modern Irish drama is generally thought to originate with the founding of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1897 by W.B. Yeats, Lady Augusta Gregory, George Moore, and Edward Martyn. Gregory raised funds from around the world that enabled the theater to start productions in 1899. One of the first productions that year, Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen, drew attacks from both Catholics and nationalists who thought there was an anti-Catholic bias in the work. That same season, Frank J. Fay, theater critic for the United Irishman, called for a national theater that would feature a natural acting style and the use of Irish actors in national drama. Frank Fay’s brother, W. G. Fay, directed the 1901 Irish Literary Theatre production of Douglas Hyde’s play in the Irish language, The Twisting of the Rope. After more productions that year, the Irish Literary Theatre disbanded, but a new company was formed in 1903 and termed the Irish National Theatre Society. In 1904, Annie Horniman gave a subsidy for the Irish National Theatre Society to move into a new building, called the Abbey Theatre. The next year, Yeats led a revolt that transferred administrative authority into the hands of the three Abbey directors: himself, Gregory, and John Millington Synge. Various other Irish theater companies flourished at this time, including the Ulster Literary Theatre in Belfast and various Irish-language groups such as Inghinidhe na hEireann (Daughters of Erin), but the funding of the Abbey, the prominence of its directors, and its high dramatic standards ensured its pre-eminence over all other groups. One great irony of the early Abbey productions, which were meant in part to recuperate Ireland’s Gaelic language and culture, was that they were almost all written and performed in English.

Irish Drama Yeats, Gregory, and Synge all shared a conviction that speech should be the focus of their plays, thus privileging the written text over all else. When Yeats recalled his dramatic work at the Abbey Theatre in his 1937 essay, ‘‘An Introduction for My Plays,’’ he pointed out the ‘‘two dominant desires’’ he had for his dramas: ‘‘I wanted to get rid of irrelevant movement, the stage must become still that words might keep all their vividness, and I wanted vivid words.’’ Yeats’s condemnation of movement, though this stance would be modified in his later drama, is made clearer by understanding his dislike of the style of acting common in English theaters at the time, a style that privileged action, not speech. In his 1900 essay, ‘‘Theatre,’’ Yeats complained that these English actors spoke ‘‘as if they were reading something out of the newspaper. They forgot the noble art of oratory, and gave all their thought to the poor art of acting, which is content with the sympathy of the nerves, until at last those who love poetry found it better to read alone in their rooms.’’ Thus the Abbey Theatre used Irish actors as much as possible. Yeats was much taken with the successful Norwegian theater movement of the 1880s and 1890s, especially that of Henrik Ibsen. Ibsen’s theater enabled Norway to escape Denmark’s cultural shadow, an exemplary maneuver that Yeats felt Ireland’s burgeoning theater movement might also make and thus escape England’s cultural dominance. More important than this cultural strategy for Yeats, however, was Ibsen’s relative preference for conversation over action in his dramatic work. The moment in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House when Nora and her husband sit and talk inaugurated modern theater with its focus on conversation rather than action. Despite his other problems with Ibsen’s theater such as his penchant for realism, Yeats probably saw in this moment something quintessentially Irish—speech—and resolved to make it the basis of his theater. Through years of tramping around the Irish countryside with Lady Gregory collecting Irish folklore, Yeats came to realize the importance of talk and storytelling in Ireland. He grew to appreciate the figure of the filidh, the Irish bard/poet who passed down memories and stories from generation to generation with a great degree of integrity because of his awesome powers of memory. But talk can also move and incite. Thus in Gregory’s and Yeats’s famous 1902 play, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, an old woman lures Michael, a young man who is preparing for a wedding, off to fight for her through her persuasive rhetoric. Her talk proves infectious and the implication is that the young man will die for this woman who represents Ireland. This emphasis on the incantatory power of speech in Yeats’s dramatic work remains in his late play, Purgatory (1938), in which the character of the Old Man manages to convince both himself and his son, whom he finally murders, that the Old Man’s mother is in a purgatorial torment for having married beneath her class. Yeats engaged in a variety of theatrical experiments, but much of his best work is marked by its poetic language and use of dance, masks, and symbolic

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Western Drama through the Ages action. His fascination with Japanese Noh drama influenced his drama after 1913 and enabled him to emphasize the imaginative and spiritual realities that he found in Irish folklore and the Irish aristocracy. Plays such as the Cuchulain cycle featuring the hero of a body of Irish mythology nonetheless show his careful attention to character development over the life of his protagonist. The Abbey repertoire soon came to feature two main types of plays: Yeats’s poetic dramas, which largely depended upon the intonation, pitch, and modulation of carefully chosen actors and actresses who would rhythmically chant their lines, and the more realistic peasant plays, which strove for authenticity in their setting, props, and costume. Both Lady Gregory and John Synge developed particular Hiberno-English dialects for their dramas that simulated vernacular speech in rural Ireland. Gregory was the only one of the three original directors of the Abbey who knew the Irish language well. Her plays, though still underappreciated, show her careful incorporation of the rural dialect near her home in western Ireland, a speech that came to be known as ‘‘Kiltartanese’’; her nuanced understanding of human nature; and her real talent at dramatic comedy. Gregory’s fictitious setting for most of her plays is called ‘‘Cloon,’’ and it is based on Gort, a fairly drab market town two miles south of her home at Coole Park. Gort lies on the border of Counties Clare and Galway with a Catholic and Protestant Church, two hotels and several businesses. Gort’s very ordinariness made it a perfect realistic counterpart to Cloon, whose characters are universal and meant to represent the range of classes and people in a typical Irish village. Gregory’s characters are largely types and she subscribed to the Aristotelian view that character is necessary to propel the action of drama. At the end of most of her comedies, there is a restoration of order, a convention common to most comedies. However, plays such as Spreading the News (1904) end more uneasily, with questions left unresolved. Hazard Adams has pointed out four traits that Gregory’s characters share: a marked resistance to governmental authority, a sense of isolation, a strong capacity for myth-making, and a tendency for believing in illusory or romantic images. Her comedies became standard repertoire for the early Abbey. John Synge also felt strongly about the importance of focusing on talk onstage in his plays. In the ‘‘Preface’’ to his most famous play, The Playboy of the Western World (1904), a play that provoked riots during its production, Synge famously affirmed the richness of vernacular language and the importance of replicating such talk in dramatic speech: [I]n countries where the imagination of the people, and the language they use, is rich and living, it is possible for a writer to be rich and copious in his words.. . .In a good play every speech should be as fully flavoured as a nut or apple, and such speeches cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry.

Irish Drama In Synge’s The Shadow of the Glen (1903) the lead female character, Nora, leaves her husband who has feigned his death in order to see if she is having an affair, to go with a tramp who has come to the house. As she leaves, she tells the tramp, ‘‘you’ve a fine bit of talk, stranger, and it’s with yourself I’ll go.’’ She had been fearful to leave with him because of the rough life she fears she must live on the road but in a grandiloquent burst of speech, he convinces her otherwise. And in Synge’s Playboy, his protagonist Christy Mahon literally transforms himself from a timid boy to an athletic man through the power of the story he tells about killing his father. Synge’s emphasis on conversation was heightened by his use of an Irish-inflected English. Synge’s meeting with Yeats in Paris in 1896 was crucial in developing his literary career. Having just returned from the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland, Yeats urged Synge to go there and immerse himself in the culture. After visiting the islands in 1898, Synge learned to incorporate the Irish and IrishEnglish he heard there into the Hiberno-English dialogue that peppers his dramas. While on the islands, he found the islanders to evince a syncretistic religious worldview that mingled Catholic beliefs with pagan ones. Much of Synge’s drama, as Weldon Thornton has argued, often invokes a stereotype but his purpose is almost always to subvert that stereotype. He continually pitted received ideas against reality in order to recreate the cognitive dissonance he experienced on the Aran Islands. Many dramas thus take a received story and twist it into a surprising shape. With Synge’s premature death in 1909 and the withdrawal of Miss Horniman’s annual subsidy in 1910, the Abbey Theatre began a decline that was finally arrested in the 1920s, when it started producing the gritty realistic urban dramas of Sean O’Casey. O’Casey’s most acclaimed dramatic work, his Dublin trilogy of The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926), explore universal human questions against the backdrop of contemporary Irish politics. O’Casey severed his relations with the Abbey after Yeats and Gregory rejected his 1928 play, The Silver Tassie. Other leading playwrights in the 1920s included T. C. Murray (1873–1959), Lennox Robinson (1886–1958), and Brinsley McNamara (1890–1963), whose work collectively established domestic realism as the dominant mode of the Abbey Theatre for decades to come. What had become a largely monolithic, inward-looking Abbey repertoire by the early 1950s could not compete with the Paris productions of the avant-garde drama written by the Irish expatriate Samuel Beckett (1906–89) and the London, then Dublin (at the Pike Theatre) productions of the work of Brendan Behan (1923–64). Beckett’s and Behan’s works from this decade such as Waiting for Godot (1953) and The Quare Fellow (1954), respectively, share an emphasis on the fruitlessness, even absurdity of modern life, even as they ask probing

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Western Drama through the Ages existential questions about the human condition and offer muted hope. Behan’s career was meteoric and short-lived, while Beckett wrote his increasingly minimalist plays well into his 80s from his home in Paris. Beckett’s debt to the spareness of Yeats’s late dramas such as Purgatory is profound, yet Beckett’s drama finally jettisons most of the rudiments of traditional drama for an even more intense focus on the individual psyche than Yeats’s plays obtained. Brian Friel (b. 1929), Thomas Kilroy (b. 1934), and Tom Murphy (b. 1936) have emerged as the outstanding Irish playwrights in Ireland in the latter half of the century. Friel’s early radio plays of the late 1950s and early 1960s are not memorable, but contemporary Irish drama began with the production of his fourth stage play, Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1964 at The Gate Theatre in Dublin, an alternate, more experimental playhouse to the traditionally realistic Abbey. Anthony Roche points out that the play’s genius lies in its deployment of ‘‘a number of innovative theatrical effects, not for their own stylistic sake, but as a means of breaking open the hidebound Abbey Theatre and exposing what the latter claimed to represent—the inner lives of Irish people.’’ The first of these devices was Friel’s idea to split his main character into two roles, Public and Private Gar, which ably psychologized him. Christopher Murray notes another revolutionary aspect of the play, surely influenced by Beckett’s drama, ‘‘was that, while using traditional materials such as a peasant setting and de´cor, with familiar characters such as a parish priest and a schoolmaster, it dispensed with plot and concentrated on situation or condition. The condition explored is alienation.’’ Finally, just as John Osborne had proposed a new anti-hero for the British stage in Jimmy Porter some nine years before in Look Back in Anger, in this drama Friel advances his own anti-hero, Gar. Murray argues that his ‘‘uncertainty and agnosticism define Gar as the new anti-hero in Irish drama.’’ Friel’s other outstanding plays include Faith Healer (1979), a play that explores the mercurial powers of an itinerant faith healer who functions as an analog for the artist; Translations (1980), a work that laments the modernity occurring in County Donegal during the British Ordnance Survey of 1833; and Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), a semiautobiographical play about Friel’s mother and her sisters, which has been made into a film featuring Meryl Streep. After a distinguished teaching and writing career as a scholar of the eighteenthcentury Irish theater, Tom Kilroy had his comedy, The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche, staged in 1968 at the Dublin Theatre Festival, while his history play, The O’Neill, was performed at the Peacock Theatre, (upstairs from the Abbey), in 1969. Other landmark works by Kilroy include his 1977 drama Talbot’s Box, about the Dublin mystic Matt Talbot; Double Cross, focusing on the twinned Irish characters of Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s Minister of Information in World War II, and William Joyce or Lord Haw Haw, Nazi sympathizer and radio broadcaster (1986), performed by the Field Day Theatre Company; and The Madame

Irish Drama MacAdam Travelling Theatre, which explores individual and national identities in the officially neutral Ireland of the 1940s. Kilroy’s continual forays into dramatic criticism and innovative theater have resulted in a fertile exploration of the stresses attendant upon modern Ireland’s emergence onto the global stage. Tom Murphy’s drama charts the lives of a series of disaffected individuals in and around the rural areas of County Galway where he grew up. His first fulllength play, A Whistle in the Dark (1961), was rejected by Ernest Blythe, then director of the Abbey Theatre. After the new Abbey Theatre opened in 1966 and Tomas MacAnna became director, many of Murphy’s plays have been staged by the Abbey, including A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer’s Assistant (1969) and The Sanctuary Lamp (1976). His most memorable and redemptive play is Bailegangaire (1985), in which a monstrous mother named Mommo, memorably played by Siobhan McKenna in her last stage role, finally tells the traumatic story of the death of her grandson by fire, a narrative she has been seeking to finish for years, aided by her granddaughters. Mommo, who speaks a mixture of Irish and English, is a figure of Mother Ireland and her guilt at her grandson’s death and those of her children recalls the keening iteration of sons by Synge’s Maurya in his naturalistic play Riders to the Sea (1904). After Mary, Mommo’s granddaughter, helps her complete her story, she envisions this family of loss as blessed and made whole by God. By extension, Murphy seems to be suggesting that contemporary Ireland must come to terms with its unconfessed sins in order for full national healing to begin. The founding of the traveling Field Day Theatre Company by Friel and the actor Stephen Rea in 1980 stands as the outstanding cultural endeavor in Irish drama toward century’s end. Field Day took as its central image the fifth province of Ireland, an imaginary space in which calcified cultural, religious, and political identities might be jettisoned and new, more unifying identities formed. Despite the relative nationalism of Friel, Rea, and most of the other intellectuals who came to join the company’s board of directors, Field Day early on was easily the most powerful joint artistic contribution to re-imagining identity in Northern Ireland during one of its darkest periods with the ongoing Maze hunger strikes by Irish Republican Army prisoners. Field Day’s productions of Friel’s plays such as Translations and later Pentecost (1987), by Belfast-born playwright Stewart Parker (1941–88), were great artistic successes and succeeded, at least for a time, in creating new corridors of communication among estranged Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. Modern Irish drama has certainly evolved from its beginnings in the early Abbey Theatre, yet it has continued to emphasize speech, storytelling, and character, while exploring a range of subject matter no longer confined merely to Irish folklore or the Irish peasantry. The emergence of new theater companies such as Charabanc and Rough Magic and new playwrights such as Christina Reid,

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Western Drama through the Ages Anne Devlin, Marina Carr, Conor McPherson, and Martin McDonagh has ensured the continuing vitality of modern, or, more accurately, contemporary Irish drama. Much as the Irish nation has become more cosmopolitan, so has its theater, even while retaining the best aspects of its dramatic inheritance.

FURTHER READING Adams, Hazard. Lady Gregory. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1973. Burke, Helen M. Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater, 1712–1784. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Clark, William Smith. The Early Irish Stage: The Beginnings to 1720. Clarendon Press, 1955. Reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973. Fletcher, Alan J. Drama, Performance, and Polity in Pre-Cromwellian Ireland. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. Murray, Christopher. ‘‘Drama 1690–1800.’’ The Field Day Anthology of Irish Literature. vol. I., Edited by Seamus Deane. Derry: Field Day Publications, 1991. ———. Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror up to Nation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Roche, Anthony. Contemporary Irish Drama from Beckett to McGuinness. Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1994. Synge, John Millington. The Complete Plays London: Methuen, 1981. Thornton, Weldon. J. M. Synge and the Western Mind. Gerrards Cross, England: Colin Smythe, 1979. Yeats, William Butler. ‘‘The Theatre.’’ Essays and Introductions. New York: Macmillan, 1961. ———. ‘‘An Introduction for My Plays.’’ The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Vol. III: The Plays. Edited by David R. and Rosalind Clark. New York: Scribner’s, 2001.


Italian Drama Ennio Italo Rao

MIDDLE AGES After the fall of the Roman Empire, theatrical activity in Italy draws its direct origins not from classical theater, but from Christian ritual. In the late eighth century an agreement was reached between Charlemagne and Pope Adrian I to standardize the liturgy. This pact allowed for the introduction of tropes, interludes inserted in the liturgical text during Mass, consisting of brief dialogues between the celebrant and the attending clerks. An example of a trope is afforded by a manuscript in the Benedictine abbey of Montecassino, known as the Officium Sepulchri Casinense. The text reads: ‘‘Processione finite, vadat Sacerdos post altarem, et versus ad Chorum dicat alta voce: Quem quaeritis? - Et duo Alii Clerici, stantes in medio Chori, respondeant: - Jesum Nazarenum. - Et Sacerdos: - Non est hic. - Illi vero converse ad Chorum dicant: - Alleluia! [At the end of the procession, let the Priest go behind the altar and turning towards the Chorus let him say aloud: - Whom do you seek? -And two Other Clerks, standing in the middle of the Chorus, will answer: - Jesus of Nazareth. -Then the Priest: - He is not here. -Let the Clerks say when turned to the Chorus: - Alleluia!]’’

The text above is an essential version of the most common trope inserted in the liturgy of the Easter celebration. More lines and more characters were introduced as time went by. Tropes are the beginning of formal drama in post-classical Italy. Their language was originally Latin, but it gradually yielded to the vernaculars. Recited at first inside the church, they later moved to its parvis or its facing public square and could be recited at the end of the liturgy by the congregation. By the eleventh century tropes were added to the liturgy of other feast days and their subjects expanded to comprise scenes of the Bible, the Apocrypha, the lives of saints,

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Western Drama through the Ages and legends concerning the Last Judgment. In the twelfth century, new lay characters were introduced: the merchant, the seller of ointments for Christ’s body, the guardians of His tomb. The thirteenth century saw a vast production of mystical poems called laude, or ‘‘lauds.’’ They were written in the vernacular and recited by lay confraternities of Umbrian ascetics, popularly known as ‘‘The Disciplined Ones’’ or ‘‘The Flagellants,’’ from their practice of public self-flagellation, as part of their condemnation of the pleasures of the flesh and the excessive wealth of the Church. The most famous author of laude is Jacopone da Todi (1236?–1306?), a Franciscan monk, and his masterpiece is Pianto della Madonna (‘‘The Madonna’s Lament’’), Mary’s moving plaint on the crucified Christ. From Umbria the laude quickly spread to Veneto, Tuscany, Marches, and Abruzzi. In a movement opposite to that of the trope, the lauda went from the public square to the church’s interior. A third theatrical form is provided by the sacra rappresentazione (‘‘sacred play’’), elaborate dramatizations of episodes from the Old and New Testament, from hagiography, and from the martyrologies. Perhaps derived from the much simpler laude, the sacra rappresentazione became very popular in Tuscany and in Rome by the second half of the fifteenth century. First performed inside the church, it was transferred to an elaborate stage erected in the public square. The actors were lay citizens (men only). The stage was divided into sections representing Heaven, Earth, and Hell. The unity of time, place, and action was not observed. Written in ottave, popular stanzas consisting of eight rhyming hendecasyllables, the sacra rappresentazione featured a prologue spoken by an Angel, who explained the action and returned at the end of the play with a brief epilogue emphasizing the moral lesson to be learned by the audience. Under the sponsorship of the Medici family, the sacra rappresentazione found such worthy practitioners as Castellano de’Castellani, Bernardo Pulci and his wife, Antonia Giannotti, and Lorenzo de’Medici himself. But by far the most prolific author was Feo Belcari (1410–84), a very pious man and author of Rappresentazione e festa di Abraam e Isaac (‘‘Play and Festival of Abraham and Isaac’’), a minor masterpiece that captures all the ethical, dramatic, and sentimental elements of the biblical tale. Drawing on the formal conventions of the sacra rappresentazione, Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) created a new genre, pastoral drama, by telling the story of Orpheus’s doomed attempt to bring back his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld in the Favola d’Orfeo (1480). Though following the structure and conventions of sacred drama with the necessary alterations (the Angel, for example, is replaced by Mercury, the messenger of the gods), Poliziano produced a secular drama from such classical sources as Virgil’s fourth Georgic, Ovid’s Metamorphoses X, Claudian’s Rape of Proserpina, and Calpurnius Siculus’s third Eclogue.

Italian Drama It should be interjected at this point that theater (like music and dance) are a constant in every culture in every age. Alongside religious theater, a comic and profane rudimentary form of drama always existed, particularly in rural areas, stemming from the winter festival that replaced the ancient Roman Saturnalia (Libertates Decembris, ‘‘December’s Licenses’’) and culminating in the election of the Pope of Fools, and from other festivities tied to the crop cycles. In urban areas, university students created satirical poetry containing dramatic elements celebrating conviviality, contempt for authority, and sexual freedom. In Sicily between 1230 and 1250 Cielo d’Alcamo composed a contrasto (‘‘dialogue’’) between a male lover and a reluctant maiden, harking back to the Provencal troubadours’ dialogues between a knight and a lady. And all of Italy was crisscrossed by bands of jongleurs, who improvised on a variety of themes, both heroic and erotic. It is interesting that comic and profane elements from these forms of popular theater crept into the sacra rappresentazione, especially in the latter’s depiction of devils.

RENAISSANCE Unlike Dante, who considered his age a direct continuation of the Roman Empire, Francesco Petrarca, or Petrarch (1304–74) was convinced that the barbarian invasions of the fifth century had ushered in a dark age that saw the beacon of Greco-Roman civilization dimmed and almost extinguished. To re-conquer the splendor that was Rome, he devised a program named studia humanitatis (‘‘the study of mankind,’’ or ‘‘liberal arts’’), centered on the study of ancient classical literature and focusing on such subjects as grammar, poetry, rhetoric, ethics, and history. A key part of the program was the recovery of the vast body of classical literature that had been lost or neglected during the Middle Ages. Petrarch’s program soon won many adherents, who are known as humanists. They feverishly looked for new manuscripts, edited new and existing texts, commenting, emending, and translating them. Ultimately, humanists composed original works in various genres, imitating their classical models. Their admiration for the Latin language was so strong that for half a century the Italian vernaculars ceased to be considered a viable literary vehicle. Petrarch himself is the first humanist to compose a comedy in Latin, Philologia (‘‘Philology’’), modeled on Terence. The comedy is now lost, only one verse having come down to us because Petrarch quoted it in a letter. According to Boccaccio, Petrarch may have authored a second comedy, but nothing of it has survived. Ironically, despite their professed love for classical literature and culture, many humanists drew their inspiration for their comedies mostly from the medieval novella and the goliardic tradition. Pier Paolo Vergerio wrote Paulus(1389–90?), a comedy set in the world of university students, aimed at ‘‘correcting the behavior

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Western Drama through the Ages of the young.’’ Antonio Beccadelli Panormita authored Janus sacerdos (Janus, the Two-Faced Priest, 1427), a comedy in which a group of students play a cruel prank at the expense of a lecherous homosexual priest. Other notable writers of Latin comedies are Leonardo Bruni Aretino (Poliscena, 1433), Ugolino Pisani (Philogenia), Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II (Chrysis, 1444), Antonio Barzizza (Cauteriaria, 1469?), and Tito Livio dei Frovolisi, author of seven comedies. In 1426, the young polymath Leon Battista Alberti published Philodoxus, purporting it to be a comedy by the Latin playwright Lepidus. The hoax was discovered much later, when a better knowledge of Roman comic meters enabled scholars to identify the comedy as spurious. Although classical models did not determine the form and content of many of the humanists’ comedies, their untiring zeal for classical literature left a fundamental imprint on the future development of Italian and European theater. When in 1429 the German Nicolaus Cusanus found a manuscript containing fourteen comedies by the Roman comic playwright Plautus, twelve of which were unknown to the Middle Ages, the discovery created an immediate sensation. Scholars pored over the texts to emend them, to comment upon them, and to fill the occasional lacunae. Thus, Poggio Bracciolini added a prologue to the first scene of Bacchides (‘‘The Two Bacchises’’), while Codrus Urceus added a last scene to Aulularia and Ermolao Barbaro filled a lacuna in Amphitryon. Plautus was one of the first classical authors to be published in printed form (first edition 1472). His fellow Roman playwright Terence, whose six comedies survived the Middle Ages, was the beneficiary of the discovery by Giovanni Aurispa in 1433 of a commentary on his plays by the grammarian Donatus. The numerous editions of Plautus and Terence prompted numerous performances of their plays, principally in Rome and Florence. In 1484 Plautus’s Aulularia was performed in the popes’ Quirinal palace! Thus Plautus and Terence, the very authors Tertulian, St. Ambrose, and St. Augustine urged Christians to shun for the salvation of their souls during the first centuries of the Church, were now performed in cathedrals and cardinals’ palaces before a delighted audience composed of popes, prelates, and potentates. The comedies of Plautus and Terence are based on the plots and characters of Greek New Comedy, whose best writers were Menander, Diphilus, and Philemon. Typical themes are mistaken identity, young love, deliberate deception, with complicated plots often combining those of two Greek originals. A constant character is the intriguing slave (servus), who often plots to bring about a tryst between his young and penniless master (adulescens) and a prostitute or closely guarded girl, to the dismay of a strict and thrifty father (senex). Sometimes the senex is himself in love, thus exposing himself to ridicule. Other characters are the braggart soldier, the merchant, the brothel keeper, and the parasite, always ready to cadge a free meal. The plot always has a happy ending, often brought about by a recognition

Italian Drama scene in which deception is revealed and true identity established, resulting in the reestablishment of the social order. The numerous translations into the Italian vernacular and the frequent productions (both in Latin and Italian) of the comedies of Plautus and Terence created a thirst for new comedies in Italian based on their model. The most fertile humus for this literary activity was provided by Ferrara and Florence. Although chronologically the first Italian comedy to observe the rules of classical composition was Publio Filippo Mantovano’s Formicone, presented at the Mantuan court of the Gonzagas in 1503, critics regard March 5, 1508, the date of the first performance of La cassaria (The Strong Box) by Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) at Ferrara’s Este court, as the real birthday of ‘‘regular’’ erudite Italian comedy. The Este family had long sponsored theatrical productions, which were well attended by courtiers and visiting dignitaries. Ariosto participated in them as actor or producer. The performances featured very elaborate costumes and scenery. The backdrops represented an idealized city and were the work of such notable artists as Raphael. The success of La cassaria was such that Ariosto put himself to work on a second comedy, I suppositi (The Presumed Ones, 1509). After a lengthy hiatus he returned to the genre in 1520 with Il negromante (‘‘The Necromancer’’), La Lena (1528), and Gli studenti (‘‘The Students’’), which Ariosto never completed. The first two comedies were written in prose, while for the other three Ariosto used the hendecasyllable line ending in a sdrucciolo (lost accent falling on the tenth syllable, followed by two unaccented syllables). In Ariosto’s opinion, this meter came closest to Plautus’ six-foot iambic verse. So satisfied Ariosto was with this solution that he later recast his first two plays in the same meter. Following faithfully the typical outlines of Plautine and Terentian theater, Ariosto’s comedies portray frustrated lovers, mistaken identities, and beffe (‘‘practical jokes’’) inflicted on deserving fools. They teem with such characters as intriguing servants, covetous old men, brothel madams, and fiery lovers. Yet they show some contemporary features: many are set not in a mythical Athens or Rome, but in the cities of Ferrara and Cremona; many introduce characters drawn from contemporary reality, like the necromancer and the Jew; and they are rich in observations of the manners and customs of Ariosto’s day, at times openly criticizing his society. Il negromante, though requested by the pope, was not performed at the Vatican because of certain criticisms of the Church. La Lena is considered Ariosto’s theatrical masterpiece. The main character, Lena, is married to Pacifico, but has a lover, the elderly Fazio, father of the beautiful Licinia, with whom the youth Flavio is desperately in love. When a dispute arises between Pacifico and one of his creditors over ownership of a barrel, Lena conspires to hide Flavio in it and to have it transported to Fazio’s house, thus enabling Flavio and Licinia to meet and eventually marry. The plot is derived from several classical comedies, as well as a novella in Boccaccio’s Decameron.

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Western Drama through the Ages Comedy was also the favorite entertainment for the court elite at Urbino. In 1513 an elaborate production of La Calandria took place, a collaboration between the Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena (1470–1520) and the ideal courtier, Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529). The extremely intricate plot includes twins of opposite sex, a credulous old man, fiery lovers, and an intriguing servant, while characters cross-dress to add to the confusion and the old fool is convinced to hide in a coffin to be able to meet the young object of his infatuation. While comedy in Ferrara and Urbino was strictly tied to life at court, in Florence it rose out of the Florentine people’s natural predilection for spectacle represented by performances of Plautus and Terence, as well as other forms close to theater: masquerades, pageants, and carnival celebrations. Thus, when comedies were written and performed in Florence, their intended audience was not a court elite, but the Florentine people, who, though ruled off and on by the Medici family, had nonetheless experienced life under a republic. This circumstance allowed Florentine playwrights to be much more critical of contemporary society than their court-employed counterparts. The best known and greatest Florentine comedy is La mandragola (The Mandrake Root) by Niccolo` Machiavelli (1469–1527). Set in Florence in 1504, the comedy was probably completed in 1518. Though drawn from classical models, it fuses material from medieval legend and from several novellas of Boccaccio. It tells of the successful attempt by the young and rich Callimaco to consummate his passion for the virtuous Lucrezia, who is married to a rich but foolish husband. To achieve his end, Callimaco must secure the collaboration of a wily servant, a toady, Lucrezia’s husband, her falsely religious mother, and a cynical and amoral friar, Fra Timoteo. Readers clearly see in this comedy the same cynical pragmatism that characterizes Machiavelli’s The Prince. Machiavelli wrote two other comedies: Le maschere (The Masks, 1504), destroyed by his nephew because deemed too offensive to some living Florentines; and Clizia, set in 1506 and first produced in 1525. Of all the major classical genres, comedy was the most unstable and the most susceptible to change. Often produced at carnival time or as part of a public feast before diverse audiences, comedies had to adapt style and language to specific circumstances in order to have an impact on the spectator and to be received favorably. The contexts within which they were performed and the disparate nature of the audiences encouraged playwrights to be uninhibited and daring in their treatment of the material. This process led eventually to the subversion of the rules governing the genre and to a rejection of its classical models. One of the most subversive authors of comedies was Pietro Aretino (1492– 1556). Born into a poor family in Arezzo, after attempting to make a living as a painter in Perugia, he moved to Rome to seek his literary fortune. A firebrand and a born iconoclast, Aretino soon ran afoul of authority for certain satirical

Italian Drama verses he wrote critical of the pope and the Roman curia. Forced to leave the city, he returned to it in 1523, but he again became involved in intrigues and polemics. In 1525 he wrote La cortigiana (The Courtesan), but the play was not performed in Rome because it contained virulent attacks against the Church. Forced to flee from Rome after escaping an assassination attempt, Aretino finally settled in Venice, where he performed a revised La cortigiana in 1534. While it observes the classical unities of time and place and the canonic division into five acts, the comedy is a chaotic succession of scenes (144 in all!) putting on parade a motley variety of characters ranging from courtiers to swindlers, go-betweens, pedants, good and bad, young and old servants, a fishmonger, real and presumed policemen, bakers, and clerics; and containing numerous references to various prelates, gluttons, and jesters, past and present, who frequented the papal court. Aretino wrote four other comedies: Il marescalco (The Captain), composed in 1527–30 and published in 1533; La Talanta (1542), Lo ipocrito (The Hypocrite, 1542), and Il filosofo (The Philosopher, 1546). All of them show considerable freedom from classical models and contain characters representing sixteenth century reality. The other rebel against the rules of comedy writing was Giordano Bruno (1548– 1600), the revolutionary believer in heliocentricity and the existence of infinite worlds, who also wrote in 1582 a most unusual comedy entitled Il candelaio (The Candle-Maker). Its five acts and numerous scenes are preceded by a sonnet, a dedication, a plot outline, an anti-prologue, a ‘‘proprologo,’’ and a ‘‘Bidello,’’ or ‘‘Janitor,’’ who casts ridicule on the ‘‘Candle-Maker,’’ a euphemism for homosexual. As he presents the trick played on the old miser Bonifacio by a sorcerer, on the pedant Manfurio by Ottaviano, and on the gullible Bartolomeo by an alchemist, Bruno harshly condemns what he considers the chief ills of his age: pedantry, superstition, and ignorance. The language, ranging from Latin to a hodgepodge of dialects, is stylistically diverse, difficult, and often deformed and grotesque, especially when placed on the lips of the pedant Manfurio. While the reader easily recognizes the classical matrix of the comedy, its overall effect is one of chaos, with plot lines that could go on ad infinitum and a rhetorically rich language that fails to communicate. Although the sixteenth century saw in its first thirty years the birth and golden age of erudite, regular comedy and later, with Aretino and Bruno, its demolition, the genre found many (though mediocre) practitioners throughout the century and beyond. Noteworthy are I simillimi (The Look-alikes, 1548) by the scholar Giangiorgio Trissino (1478–1550), little more than a translation of Plautus’s Menaechmi; Vecchio amoroso (The Old Man in Love, 1533–36) by Donato Giannotti (1492–1573); Amor costante (Steadfast Love, 1536) and Gli ingannati (The Duped Ones) by Alessandro Piccolomini (1508–78); and Gli straccioni (The Tramps, 1544) by the distinguished poet Annibal Caro (1507–66).

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Western Drama through the Ages Anton Francesco Grazzini, called ‘‘Il Lasca’’ (1503–84) contributed eight comedies, Giovanmaria Cecchi (1518–87) twenty-one, while the Neapolitan Giovan Battista Della Porta (1535–1615) authored fourteen. Given the reverence that the humanists felt for classical literature, it was inevitable that they would turn their attention to one of its loftiest genres: tragedy. Although there had been some earlier attempts, most notably Eccerinis by Albertino Mussato (1261–1329), the real stimulus to write tragedies came after the publication in Venice in 1498 of Giorgio Valla’s translation of Aristotle’s Poetics. Further interest was stirred by the new translation by Alessandro de’Pazzi, published by Aldus Manutius in 1536 and by the commentaries and criticisms of such scholars as Francesco Robortello, Sperone Speroni, Julius Caesar Scaliger, and Lodovico Castelvetro. Unfortunately, Italian tragedians took a strictly academic approach to their compositions, with the result that creativity was suffocated by rigorous adherence to the rules extracted from Aristotle: unity of action, time, and place; and noble characters. The pace is static, with important action occurring offstage and reported by eyewitnesses or messengers. Furthermore, Italian tragedies were trammeled by overblown rhetoric and bombastic language suited for declamation. They abound in brooding soliloquies and show a pronounced taste for the horrible derived from the Roman playwright Seneca the Younger. Some notable tragedies are Sofonisba (1513) by Giangiorgio Trissino (1475–1550), and Rosmunda (1515) by Giovanni Rucellai (1475–1525). Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinthio (1504–73) contributed a treatise on composing comedies and tragedies as well as several tragedies, including Orbecche (1541), Didone, and Cleopatra. It is interesting that the last two were published posthumously. Sperone Speroni (1500–88) wrote Canace in 1546, while the same year Pietro Aretino contributed Orazia. Later in the century the great Torquato Tasso (1544–95) wrote the horrific Il Re Torrismondo (1587). These plays were read and seldom performed. Today they are read mostly in the schools. The tragedians’ strict adherence to classical rules, especially that which limited them to the portrayal of great and noble characters, made them blind to a wealth of tragic material, which had to be dealt with in other genres, like the novella. Ironically, the tragic plot of a novella by Giraldi Cinthio inspired Shakespeare’s Othello, while a novella by Matteo Bandello provided the plot for Romeo and Juliette. In addition to the rich production of comedies and tragedies, the sixteenth century saw the creation of a variety of dramatic sub-genres. Giraldi Cinthio began to write tragicomedies—tragedies with a happy ending, where villains get their just punishment. He also wrote Egle (performed in 1535), a pastoral drama developed from the Greek and Roman eclogue and related in content to Poliziano’s Favola d’Orfeo (1480). Born as court entertainment, pastoral drama is a hybrid genre, with comic and tragic elements, written in a lofty language and featuring musical

Italian Drama interludes. Its themes are the beauty of nature, the simple life, and the pain of unrequited love. Other writers in this genre are Baldassare Castiglione [Tirsi, (Thyrsis, 1506] and Alberto Lolio (Aretusa, performed in 1563). By far the best known pastoral dramas are Torquato Tasso’s Aminta (1573) and Battista Guarino’s seven-thousand-line long Pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd, written between 1583 and 1587, performed 1595). Aminta was an instant success from its first performance at the court of Mantua. Under the guise of nymphs and shepherds hide courtiers and literati, whom Tasso praises or exposes to ridicule. Pastor fido also had great success, especially abroad, where it became the chief inspiration for the subsequent development of European pastoral drama. Rustic farces, set in the bucolic world of peasants, also became popular as a parody of the pastoral drama. They were written mostly in dialect and featured characters that could be easily identified with the local peasantry. These farces have much in common with the commedia popolare o rusticale (popular or rustic comedy). Farces were popular in the Venetian area, in Tuscany, and in Campania, where they were called farse cavaiole, (farces from Cava dei Tirreni). A prolific writer who straddled the two genres was Angelo Beolco, known as ‘‘Il Ruzante’’ (The Frisky One), from the name of one of his most famous characters. Among his numerous comedies and farces are La pastoral (1517–18), La Betı´a (1524– 25), and La Moscheta (The Flirt, 1529). The sixteenth century also marked the flowering of the commedia dell’arte (professional comedy), a unique kind of comedy whose influence quickly spread throughout Europe. The commedia dell’arte was comedy improvised around a standardized situation (scenario or canovaccio) and featured a variety of stock characters. The scenario offered a bare-bones plot, duly divided into acts and scenes. Plots were inspired by the most successful erudite comedies and featured love between young people, love between an older man and a younger woman, clever tricks to procure money or food or to outwit a dullard. The comedies were performed by a professional troupe, each actor having a specialization. The set scenes were interrupted by lazzi (‘‘gags’’), performed by very athletic actors who specialized in acrobatic feats, pantomime, juggling, and obscene gestures. The characters of the commedia dell’arte wore a conventional dress and a mask that made them immediately recognizable to the audience. These include old men: Pantalone from Venice and the Doctor from Bologna; young lovers with such names as Isabella, Silvia and Flaminia, and Fortunio, Ottavio, and Valerio. The heroine’s servant was often called Colombina. Another stock character was the descendant of the braggart soldier of Plautine comedy, Capitan Spaventa, often Spanish—a reminder of the ascendancy of Spain in Italian politics after 1559. But the embodiment of the spirit of the commedia dell’arte was the jester, or Zanni, who could also be called Arlecchino (‘‘Harlequin’’), Pedrolino, Pulcinella, Scapino, Burattino, among many other names. Zanni hailed from Bergamo, Pulcinella

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Western Drama through the Ages from Naples. Most Italian regions eventually created their own jester or their own stock character. It was the jester who provided the comic entertainment of the paying audience. Professional companies were created in the major Italian cities. They often went on tour and many performed before the crowned heads of Europe. All roles were first played by men. The first woman to perform on stage was Isabella Andreini in 1550. The characters and the contents of the commedia dell’arte became quickly familiar in other countries. For example, Pedrolino became the French Pierrot, while Pulcinella became Punch in England. Traces of the commedia dell’arte persist to this day, following a trajectory that spans a spectrum encompassing Shakespeare, Molie`re, and American slapstick. A revival is under way in Italy.

SEVENTEENTH, EIGHTEENTH, AND NINETEENTH CENTURIES In the seventeenth century the commedia dell’arte continued to thrive, with performances attracting spectators in every court and public square in Italy and winning ever wider audiences abroad. It began to decline after 1650 as a result of excessive specialization among actors. Tragedy continued to be cultivated, but its appeal was limited to the refined elite. Practitioners of the genre were Cardinal Giovanni Delfino (1617–99), author of three tragedies (Cleopatra, Lucrezia, and Creso), all printed posthumously. Carlo de’Dottori (1618–85) wrote Aristodemo (1657), heavily drawing on Greek tragedy, while showing a penchant for horror reminiscent of the younger Seneca. Another prolific tragedian was Federico Della Valle (c. 1560–1628), author of the biblically inspired Iudit (1627) and Ester (1627), and La reina di Scotia (‘‘The Queen of Scotland,’’ 1628), dealing with the final hours of Mary Stuart before her execution. Inspired by the program issued from the Council of Trent, seeking edifying drama based on the lives of saints and martyrs, tragedia sacra (sacred tragedy) had many practitioners. Two Jesuit authors stand out: Pietro Sforza Pallavicino (1607–67), author of Ermenegildo martire(1644), and Emanuele Tesauro (1592–1675), who wrote Ermenegildo (1661), both plays exalting the martyr’s unfaltering faith. Pastoral drama continued to be popular and was extended from the idyllic world of shepherds to include the realm of fishermen, sailors, and woodsmen. But the century’s greatest contribution to the theater by far was the creation of musical drama, which we know today as opera. Very late in the sixteenth century a group of literati and musicians constituted a club in Florence called the Camerata dei Bardi with the aim of recreating Greek drama, intended as a perfect synthesis of language, music, and dance. They found the most suitable subject for their experiment to be Greek mythology and ancient history. The first musical drama is Dafne (‘‘Daphne,’’ 1598) with a libretto by Ottavio Rinuccini

Italian Drama (1562–1621) and music by Jacopo Peri (1561–1633). The recognized masterpiece produced by the Camerata is Orfeo (‘‘Orpheus,’’ 1607) by Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), still performed and several times recorded. The staging of musical drama led to the creation of elaborate scene painting, set decoration, and stage machinery, thus establishing conventions that endure to this day. Changing tastes and the emergence in Venice of a refined bourgeoisie as the dominant class created dissatisfaction with the commedia dell’arte and a demand for its reform and revitalization. Reform came with Carlo Goldoni (1707–92). A lawyer by profession, he became writer-in-residence for the Teatro Sant’Angelo in his native Venice, a privileged perch that allowed him to enact his agenda. Appalled by the absurdity, vulgarity, and tastelessness into which the commedia dell’arte had fallen, Goldoni set about its gradual reform, creating a theater that was true to life and reflected the problems facing Italian society. He began by writing out the dialogues and by reducing the lazzi, eventually dropping the masks. Among his numerous comedies are La vedova scaltra (The Cunning Widow, 1748), La locandiera (The Mistress of the Inn, 1753), and La bottega del caffe` (The Coffee Shop). A keen observer of customs, Goldoni won admirers in Italy and abroad, but also encountered harsh opposition from a Venetian nobleman, Count Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806). A staunch conservative and enemy of innovations, he strongly criticized Goldoni’s realism and set out to prove that the public could be happy to watch even a fiaba (fairy tale). Accordingly, he wrote ten fairy tales, the most famous being L’amore delle tre melarance (The Love for Three Oranges, 1761); Re cervo (King Stag, 1762); Turandot (1762), an exotic play set in a mythical China; and L’augellin belverde (The Beautiful Green Bird, 1765). They proved to be very popular and two of them inspired music by Puccini and Prokofiev in the twentieth century. In the first half of the eighteenth century, tragedy was dominated by the French models of Racine and Voltaire. In the second half, however, Vittorio Alfieri (1749– 1803) came upon the scene with an original voice. He wrote nineteen tragedies between 1775 and 1789, drawn from biblical, Roman, and Renaissance history. A patriot who decried Italy’s condition of servitude, he was obsessed with the subject of tyranny. His plays are characterized by the terseness of their language and the strength of the passions it expresses. Although well crafted and adhering to the classical unities, Alfieri’s plays are more suited for reading than for performance. After Italy achieved independence, they were known only in academic circles. The most famous of his tragedies is Saul (1782), the story of the guiltridden king of the Jews. Eighteenth century Italy made original contributions in the field of musical drama as well. Chief among the authors of melodrammi is Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782), a member of the Arcadia Academy that aimed at restoring simplicity and good taste to Italian poetry as an antidote to the artifice and frivolity of the

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Western Drama through the Ages Baroque. Metastasio produced exquisitely melodious dramas that were immediately set to music by the greatest composers of his day. His best known plays are Didone abbandonata (Dido Abandoned, 1724), Semiramide (Semiramis, 1729), and La clemenza di Tito (The Clemency of Titus, 1734), the last set to music by Mozart. The nineteenth century in Italy is the century of opera. It saw the rise of such great composers as Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868), Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848), Vincenzo Bellini (1801–35), and Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), whose music resonated in every opera house from the Alps to Sicily to delirious applause. Although the aforementioned composed magnificent music, their operas’ libretti were of uneven quality, ranging from the chaotic Il trovatore (The Troubadour, 1853) of Salvatore Cammarano, through the mediocre Macbeth (1847) by Francesco Maria Piave, to the sublime poetry and dramatic power of Otello (1887) and Falstaff (1893) by Arrigo Boito. Tragedies were written by the great romantic poets Ugo Foscolo (1778–1828) and Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873). The chorus from the latter’s Adelchi (1822) are among the most sublime verses in the Italian language and until recently had to be memorized by all Italian schoolchildren. The play, however, is very seldom performed as its lack of dramatic power fails to hold an audience. Theater in the second half of the century fell under the influence of the French ‘‘thesis play’’ of Alexandre Dumas fils and E´mile Augier. Themes explored by Italian playwrights were divorce, marriage between different social classes, and the practice of dueling to defend one’s honor. A later influence came from the French naturalist school. Exponents of this movement are Marco Praga (1862– 1929), whose plays are critical of the conventions of the bourgeois world of his native Milan; and Giuseppe Giacosa (1847–1906). Though his first theatrical works were dramas set in the Middle Ages, Giacosa changed his course, writing plays with a bourgeois setting. His best-known play is Come le foglie (Like Falling Leaves, 1900), permeated with a melancholy atmosphere reminiscent of Chekhov. Giacosa is also known as the coauthor with Luigi Illica of several libretti for Giacomo Puccini’s operas.

TWENTIETH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT The last years of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century witnessed the last pangs of naturalism and saw two giants of Italian literature at work for the theater. Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), best known for his novels and poetry, wrote La figlia di Iorio (Iorio’s Daughter, 1904), a ‘‘pastoral tragedy’’ set in an undetermined time among the shepherds of Abruzzi. He also wrote three medieval verse tragedies, the best known of which is Francesca da Rimini (1901), inspired by the character in Dante’s Inferno. The other playwright is Giovanni Verga

Italian Drama (1840–1922), who turned to the theater after achieving great fame as the author of late romantic and veristic novels. In 1884 he made a play out of a successful short story, Cavalleria rusticana (Rustic Chivalry). Later, it formed the libretto for Pietro Mascagni’s famous opera. Verga wrote seven other dramatic works, the most famous of which is La lupa (The She-Wolf, 1896), but he never matched the success of his first theatrical work. Opera embraced Verismo, spawned from French Naturalism, and saw the masterpieces of Ruggero Leoncavallo, Pietro Mascagni, and Giacomo Puccini, while in the prose theater Luigi Chiarelli (1884–1947) inaugurated the ‘‘theater of the grotesque’’ with La maschera e il volto (The Mask and the Face, 1916), a comedy based on the paradoxical situations that everyday life presents. At last, after hosting a long line of homunculi stretching back a century and a half, the Italian stage saw the rise of a giant, fully the peer of Ibsen and Shaw. Having already earned fame as a poet, novelist, and short-story writer, Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) made his theatrical debut with a number of plays in his native Sicilian dialect: La morsa (The Vise) and Lumı´e di Sicilia (Sicilian Limes), both of 1910, followed by Pensaci, Giacomino! (Think About It, Giacomino!) and Liola` in 1917, and Il berretto a sonagli (The Cap with Bells) in 1918. The protagonists of the last three plays are rugged individualists, who defy social conventions and advocate a rational existence free of social prejudices. It is with Cosı` e` (se vi pare) [Right You Are (If You think So)] of 1917 that Pirandello began to tackle squarely existential problems. The theme faced in this play is that of the relativity of truth, or of the simultaneous existence and validity of multiple truths. In 1921 Pirandello produced Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Six Characters in Search of An Author), a revolutionary play about the nature of artistic creativity. In it six characters from an unfinished short story interrupt the rehearsal of a play by Pidandello and ask the director to enact their tragic story on the stage in order to be fully realized. The play befuddled both audiences and critics. Undaunted, Pirandello continued on his innovative and provocative path and gained recognition and accolades in France, Germany, and the United States. Enrico IV (Henry IV, 1922) is a further exploration into the theme of reality and a profound study of schizophrenia. In 1932 Pirandello produced Questa sera si recita a soggetto (Tonight We Improvise), his most controversial play, with action taking place on stage and among the audience, while a director named Dr. Hinkfuss (German for Oedipus) is attempting to put on a play. Some actors disperse among the audience, heckle the actors on stage, and a fight breaks out, while an actress almost dies on stage, overcome by emotion. Critics accused Pirandello of ‘‘cerebralism’’ and of playing dialectic games, but audiences continued to flock to his plays, recognizing that Pirandello was tackling the most troubling themes: existential anxiety, the relativity of truth, despairing solitude, and the nature of the creative process. He was awarded the prestigious

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Western Drama through the Ages Nobel Prize in 1934. He still remains the most performed Italian playwright and is as popular in Italy as Shakespeare is in English-speaking countries. There is no professional or amateur theatrical group in Italy that does not include at least one of his plays on its playbill. His influence on modern theater is far-reaching and he is considered the inspiration for the ‘‘theater of the absurd.’’ After Pirandello the most noteworthy voices are those of Eduardo De Filippo (1900–84), born into a family of actors, who wrote plays set in the Neapolitan middle and lower classes and strongly reminiscent of Italian neorealist cinema; and Dario Fo (b. 1926), who has experimented with the commedia dell’arte, with a free cabaret form, and with the tradition of the jongleurs. His work has recently (1997) achieved international recognition by being awarded the Nobel Prize.

FURTHER READING Andrews, Richard. Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Bondanella, Peter and Julia Conaway Bondanella, co-eds. The Macmillan Dictionary of Italian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1979. Brand, Peter and Lino Pertile. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Clubb, Louise George. Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. New Haven: Yale University Press, c. 1989. Greg, Walter W. Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama: A Literary Inquiry. New York: Russell & Russell, 1959. Herrick, Marvin T. Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1950. ———. Italian Comedy in the Renaissance. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, [1970]. ———. Italian Tragedy on the Renaissance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965. ———. Tragicomedy: Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1955. Hochman, Stanley, ed. The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of World Drama: An International Reference Work in 5 Volumes. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984. Kerman, Joseph. Opera as Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Muir, Lynette R. The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Radcliff-Umstead, Douglas. The Birth of Modern Comedy in Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. Ragusa, Olga. Luigi Pirandello: An Approach to his Theatre. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1980. Richards, Kenneth and Laura Richards. The commedia dell’arte: A Documentary History. Oxford: B. Blackwell for Shakespeare Head Press, 1990. Sadie, Stanley. History of Opera. New York: Norton, 1990. Sternfeld, Frederick. The Birth of Opera. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.


Latin American Theater George Woodyard

BACKGROUND Although there has been theater in the Americas since the time of the Spanish conquest, or even before, the movement came into its own in the 1950s and 1960s, soon after World War II, when a new generation of playwrights and directors launched their careers and became the canonical figures of the late twentieth century. The quantity and quality of this movement is astonishingly high, even though it remains generally ignored or unknown by the majority American public. This brief overview will attempt a broad brush approach to a topic that spans 500 years, 20 some countries and represents a combined population of well over a half billion people at the present time.

Colonial Influences Before the twentieth century, the theater in Latin America was strongly influenced by the colonial powers, both Spain and Portugal. Both countries used their own developing theater traditions at the time of the early conquest to convert the indigenous populations to the Roman Catholic faith. The conquest was a military-political venture, but the religious factor was of equal importance to the early conquerors, and the Indian populations not decimated by wars and European diseases were quickly instructed in the faith. The conquerors took advantage of indigenous dances, songs, and cultural traditions to ease the transition. Within a few years a secular theater began to emerge in those areas of greatest political importance, such as the Caribbean, Mexico and Peru. As the theater in the mother countries passed from its infancy into more developed forms of Renaissance

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Western Drama through the Ages theater and eventually the baroque, these styles and traditions were quickly transferred to Latin America. In the sixteenth century Ferna´ndez de Eslava in Mexico wrote short pieces that were performed in churches and public plazas extolling, sometimes with a tongue-in-cheek attitude, the tenets of the church and doctrine. In Brazil Padre Anchieta developed a serious theater also with a religious bent. By the end of the seventeenth century, the baroque traditions were well established, and one of the greatest talents of all in the New World, a young Mexican nun named Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz, wrote both religious and secular plays, in verse, that stand beside the masterpieces of Lope de Vega or Caldero´n de la Barca in Spain as superb examples of baroque literature.

NINETEENTH CENTURY THEATER If the eighteenth century represented a decline in Spanish and Portuguese literary fortunes, the theater in Latin America reflected the same tendencies, although productions were often imported from Europe. By the nineteenth century theater was generally widespread throughout the colonies, including Argentina and the southern cone. Following the wars of independence from 1810 to 1825, the influence of the late-blooming romantic period in Spain was noticeable and continued, with many variations, throughout the rest of the century. Writers such as the Argentine Luis Ambrosio Morante, the Mexican Fernando Caldero´ n, or the Cuban-born Gertrudis Go´mez de Avellaneda began to establish national standards for theater activity. By the end of the century, while the quality was far from uniform throughout the Americas (and still is not), there were strong indications of solid development from Mexico to the southern cone. When Pablo Podesta´ adapted the legend of the gaucho Juan Moreira to the circus in 1884, the modern Argentine theater was underway.

TWENTIETH CENTURY THEATER At the beginning of the twentieth century in Argentina the dominant figure was, curiously, the Uruguayan-born Florencio Sa´nchez, whose plays captured the essence of a country in a process of rapid social change. The massive migrations from Spain and Italy had quickly doubled the population at the end of the nineteenth century. Sa´nchez created believable and emotional characters with a quick and sardonic dialogue that epitomized problems of immigration, adaptation, and social conflict. His masterpiece, Barranca abajo, focused on the problems of an old gaucho, abandoned by his family and by his protective network, who finds no recourse except suicide. Sa´nchez’s influence is found in authors from Uruguay, Cuba, Mexico, and of course in Argentina where a school of successors continued his traditions. By the 1920s Argentine authors were experimenting with the

Latin American Theater metatheatrical techniques of Pirandello, who visited there twice. Armando Disce´polo in Ste´fano and Mateo captured a new idiom by combining creole influences with the grotesque. By the late 1920s a movement to break old traditions in favor of newer European models became apparent. Known as experimental theater in Mexico and independent theater in Argentina, the focus shifted from the actor/actress to the importance of the director in coordinating all aspects of a production. Smaller, intimate theaters for 100 or 200 replaced the gigantic halls used for the popular music reviews. New electric lighting systems capable of highlighting performers and dramatic nuances replaced antiquated gas or even candle systems. The prompter’s box disappeared as actors were expected to memorize lines, unlike during previous periods when hasty (sometimes weekly) productions rendered it impossible. Local accents came into vogue instead of the standard Castilianbased speech from Madrid. The role of the director, following the European models of Gordon Craig or Appia and others, became critical for coordinating all aspects of an aesthetic performance. In Mexico the Teatro Ulises 1928 season featured only foreign plays, but it provided the impetus for other groups to stage national plays in the new style. Rodolfo Usigli, the father of the modern Mexican theater, while not a participant in the experimental theater movement, became active in the 1930s. His El gesticulador and Corona de sombra (1947) are both canonical works that examine history to reinterpret Mexican core values. In Argentina the movement was characterized by a sociopolitical tendency as well when Leo´ nidas Barletta opened his Teatro del Pueblo in 1930, thereby launching the independent theater movement that lasted until the mid-1950s. A leftist militant romantic, Barletta was a friend and patron of the underprivileged and his theater offered an artistic alternative to the commercial theater of the time. He promoted national authors while at the same time staging Shakespeare, Gogol, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Lope, and Molie`re, and in the process laid the groundwork for other independent groups such as Juan B. Justo and La Ma´scara. Barletta also introduced novelist Roberto Arlt to the theater, an author whose master works include Saverio el cruel, a play that deals with a hapless peasant type as a pawn of the idle rich. Other countries in Latin America also caught the new wave. In Puerto Rico the Ateneo in 1938 sponsored a competition for new plays; in Chile the visits by theater groups fleeing the Spanish Civil War led to a major change that came, curiously, via the university theater programs, first at the University of Chile (1941) and then at the Catholic University (1943). Also in 1943 a Polish emigree to Brazil staged an expressionist play by Nelson Rodrigues that fostered new concepts. The prosperity and social change that came to Latin America after World War II began to invoke major adjustments, as authors, directors, and impresarios sought to capture a local or national reality to replace the customary imported theater.

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Western Drama through the Ages A turning point in Argentina was the production of El puente (1949) by Carlos Gorostiza, a play with a dual structure that focuses on the agonies of two families, one rich, one poor, equally affected by the deaths of two co-workers in a bridge accident. This canonical play was the first in Argentina to transcend a move from the independent to the commercial theater. The following year marked the debut of Emilio Carballido in Mexico with Rosalba y los Llaveros, thereby launching a career marked by diversity, realism, fantasy, and humor. The prolific Carballido set the theater standards in Mexico throughout the rest of the century by combining realism with satire, farce, and humor. His anthologies and support helped to launch later generations of writers. The relatively favorable conditions for publishing and staging new plays in the 1950s spawned a new burst of activity. Common themes were social, economic, and political issues, plus psychological and even religious matters. Realism is the dominant mode, although experimental styles emerge by the 1960s. In Mexico, Luisa Josefina Herna´ndez, Rafael Solana, Federico S. Incla´n and others characterized Mexican society in its new environment. Puerto Rico’s Rene´ Marque´s wrote Los soles truncos, a masterpiece describing Puerto Rico’s ambivalent status as a commonwealth with a divided heritage. The Colombian Enrique Buenaventura with his Teatro Experimental de Cali adopted a leftist ideology, as did Osvaldo Dragu´n in Argentina when he wrote the first of his Historias para ser contadas, brief but pithy plays that challenged a complacent public. During the 1950s theater was at best moribund in Cuba under Batista, but the new communist regime of Fidel Castro that came to power in 1959 recognized the power of theater and the arts as a medium for political ideology. Theater was promoted throughout the island, while international festivals and competitions sprang up in order to provide new venues. Exiled Cubans such as Jose´ Triana returned to participate in the Revolution. Triana’s multi-layered La noche de los asesinos was a huge success both at home and abroad, but soon Triana, along with two other writers, Heberto Padilla and Anto´n Arrufat, was accused of being unfaithful to Revolutionary goals. Groups such as Escambray and Cubana de Acero focused on Revolutionary ideals. In the 1960s many new trends and issues emerged. In Chile Jorge Dı´az began writing an absurdist style of theater, previously unknown in the Americas. His El cepillo de dientes played with language in a two-character play that broke traditional rules, and set a pattern of socio-political interest within an absurdist vein. In Argentina the Arthur Miller-inspired, neo-realist theater of Ricardo Halac and the ever-popular Roberto Cossa launched a direction the two authors would continue to pursue throughout the century. At about the same time, a neovanguardist, more experimental, theater developed, more attuned toward a new language of the stage with elements of the Argentine grotesque. Griselda Gambaro and Eduardo Pavlovsky both started writing in the 1960s in an experimental style with

Latin American Theater resonances of the absurd. Pavlovsky soon moved to more overt political expression and his El sen˜or presidente anticipated the horrors of Argentina during its ‘‘Dirty War.’’ Gambaro is a master craftsman whose focused plays, both short and full-length, have fascinated an Argentine and international public for the past 30 years. Across the Americas, theater became increasingly strident and impassioned, both reflecting and anticipating massive social changes sweeping across the hemisphere. By the end of the 1960s two new tendencies were developing: one was to look more deeply into local and national traditions to find expression for social concerns, instead of looking for models in European or North American theater, although Artaud, Brecht and Williams continued to inspire. A series of national and international theater festivals provided a forum for exchanging ideas, for seeing styles and patterns of other groups, especially from neighboring countries, and for discussing with other playwrights, directors, actors, and theater personnel their objectives and their dreams. The theater festival of Manizales, Colombia, first held in October of 1968, marks a turning point because of the interaction of groups from many countries and the participation of such notable personalities as Pablo Neruda and Miguel Angel Asturias, both Nobel laureates. The Manizales festival was not the first international theater festival in the Americas, but it became a landmark for celebrating these traditions. The second new tendency was the development of the creacio´n colectiva (the collective creation), a movement that swept Latin America in the late 1960s and continues to the present, although now greatly reduced in scope. In Colombia Enrique Buenaventura with the TEC (Teatro Experimental de Cali) and Santiago Garcı´a with La Candelaria were pioneers in this movement which inverted the traditional hierarchy of author, producer, director and actor, and replaced it with a system in which all roles, from author to actor, could be assumed by any and all members of the group. Performances were normally highly politicized, and written texts were minimized with the result that the period is marked by a relative paucity of canonical texts. The pendulum starts to swing back in the mid 1980s with renewed emphasis on the text author, but several groups have maintained a high profile, such as ICTUS in Chile, Yuyachkani and Cuatrotablas in Peru, and Teatro de los Andes in Bolivia, to name only a few.

Recent Developments in Latin American Drama The past twenty years have been a particularly fertile period, one that coincides with the postmodernist, postcolonial period. Prominent new authors emerge, such as Marco Antonio de la Parra in Chile, Sabina Berman and Vı´ctor Hugo Rasco´n Banda in Mexico, Roberto Ramos-Perea in Puerto Rico, Eduardo Rovner in Argentina, and a host of others. Their plays provide new ways of looking at history,

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Western Drama through the Ages gender issues, and even theater itself. Sabina Berman, author of some 20 plays, scored a tremendous hit with Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (both on stage and screen) which folds together in witty and entertaining ways issues of traditional Mexican machismo, as seen through Pancho Villa, and contemporary gender questions and sexual mores. In later plays she continues her assaults on problems deeply imbedded in the fabric of Mexican culture as she challenges her reader or public to take a fresh look at Trotsky, Freud, Molie`re, homosexuality, Judaism, and a plethora of other issues. Her compatriot, Vı´ctor Hugo Rasco´n Banda, has captured the public imagination through documentary plays, often inspired by actual news events, which focus on issues of vital interest such as death and dying, La Malinche, Tina Modotti, the Jua´rez murders, and other women’s issues. In the southern cone, the level of dramatic activity has been exceptionally high, even during the periods of brutal dictatorships in both Chile and Argentina. In Chile, earlier writers such as Egon Wolff and Juan Radriga´n have been joined by Benjamı´n Galemiri, Ramo´n Griffero and Marco Antonio de la Parra. The last, whose success and career have paralleled that of Sabina Berman in the north, challenged the system during the Pinochet years with such remarkable plays as La secreta obscenidad de cada dı´a, and has continued to do so with later plays that provide extraordinary insights into Chilean politics, social structures, and values. While it seems inherently unfair to mention only one or two writers from principal countries, the lists are so long there are no good alternatives. A younger generation has brought new life and new tendencies (Daniel Veronese, Rafael Spregelburd, Alejandro Tantanian, for example) to the Argentine stage, in addition to numerous women writers. A staple has been the work of Eduardo Rovner whose lighter works capture with good humor the foibles of the human condition, especially in Argentina. The volume of activity in other countries does not match that of Argentina and Mexico, but it is equally important in representing the effort to find a dramatic voice for national and social concerns. Uruguayan theater, closely associated with Buenos Aires, has astonishingly talented women writers such as Maria Ferreira and Marita Fornaro; in Paraguay the indomitable Edda de los Rı´os promotes performance and activity. In Venezuela Rodolfo Santana and Gustavo Ott have mesmerized audiences after the sacrosanct years of the ‘‘holy trinity’’ (Isaac Chocro´n, Jose´ Ignacio Cabrujas, Roma´n Chalbaud). Throughout Central America there is a constant level of activity, notably higher in Costa Rica and Panama. Puerto Rico has shown increasing activity through veteran writers such as Myrna Casas as well as Roberto Ramos-Perea, whose political activism reflects the island’s constant identity crisis. Following the collapse of the Soviet system, the situation in Cuba has evolved into greater openness and even frank criticism of the government, a position that would have been unthinkable during the earlier hard-line ideological years.

Latin American Theater The cultural interplay with the islands has had a major impact on mainland U.S. Hispanic theater, especially along the eastern seaboard from New York to Florida. The Puerto Rican population in New York has been active for many years (for example, Miriam Colo´n’s Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre), although many other groups promote Hispanic themes and values, such as the Spanish Repertory Theatre and INTAR. In Washington DC the Gala Theatre and Teatro de la Luna have maintained active programs, and naturally in Florida, the Cuban population has taken a lead in sponsoring Hispanic theater, especially the Teatro Avante, directed by Mario Ernesto Sa´nchez, with its annual festival. The other major component of Hispanic theater in the United States comes from the Chicano influence which emerged in the mid-1960s under the leadership of Luis Valdes in California and has since mushroomed, not just in the four or five states with traditionally large Mexican American populations, but to many cities across the country. With the United States now ranked as the fourth largest Spanish speaking country in the world, it is not surprising to find a wealth of theater activity to reflect these cultural influences. These comments address the traditional theater but do not attempt to describe the myriad alternative forms of popular theater, street theater and performance activities, which are more difficult to document but ubiquitous throughout the Americas. As our definition of theater has become more expansive, everything from the cabaret theater of Jesusa Rodrı´guez and Astrid Hadad in Mexico City to the protest activities of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires have become the subject of books and critical articles. A popular theater festival runs opposite the elite festival in Bogota´ , for example, as a vehicle of alternative offerings. All five of Latin America’s Nobel laureates were involved with theater, but the grassroots manifestations are equally exciting and valid. Along with the proliferation of authors, directors, plays, and performances throughout Latin America and within the United States has come a corresponding increase in corollary activities. Pioneer theater historians from the 1960s who conceived of and documented a ‘‘Latin American theatre’’ (Carlos Solo´rzano, Jose´ Juan Arrom, Frank Dauster) have been followed by many others. Texts are published, sometimes anthologized in interesting combinations, while periodic journals disseminate texts, as well as critical and performance information about the field (Apuntes, Conjunto, Dio´genes, Tablas, Teatro XXI, to name only a few). The two best known in the United States are Gestos and the Latin American Theatre Review. Theater festivals provide venues to see Latin American theater, often within an international context, in Manizales and Bogota´ (Colombia), Buenos Aires, Bolivia, Central America, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Ca´ diz (Spain). Within the United States an itinerant academic conference features work on Latin American theater and encourages deeper study in the field, now recognized in academic circles in the United States as an important area of

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Western Drama through the Ages Hispanic literature and performance culture. The past fifty years have witnessed a remarkable development in this area; the future of Latin American theater looks bright for years to come.

FURTHER READING Bixler, Jacqueline. Convention and Transgression: The Theatre of Emilio Carballido. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1997. Graham-Jones, Jean. Exorcising History: Argentine Theatre under Dictatorship. Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2000. Versenyi, Adam. Theatre in Latin America: Religion, Politics and Culture from Cortes to the 1980’s. Cambridge University Press, 1993.


Polish Theater Artur Grabowski

EARLY THEATER IN POLAND From the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries ‘‘Quem queritis?’’ (Who are you looking for?) Jesum Nasarenum (Jesus from Nazareth). With these words, half spoken, half sung, theater in Poland began, according to Zbigniew Raszewski. A dramatic script of the ‘‘visitation of the grave,’’ known in all of medieval Europe, ‘‘was initially strictly ritual. It appeared once a year, on Easter morning, spoken in Latin with the words of the Gospel. It constituted part of the liturgy; therefore we call it liturgical drama.’’ The contents of those micro-dramas, usually performed by seminarists or monks in churches, consisted basically of one scene: three women, all named Mary, visit Christ’s grave and, having found it empty, talk to an Angel guarding it. He explains that the Lord has risen from the dead, so they should hurry back to the disciples to proclaim the completion of the foretold miracle. The oldest records, found in Cracow, come from the thirteenth century. With time, scripts of the performances retelling individual episodes of Christ’s final path evolved into longer passion plays and finally into complete mystery plays. Unfortunately, we do not know much about them; we can only boast of a few fragments preserved in the form of religious lyrics. The rest was destroyed by wars. Therefore, for a historian, medieval drama in Poland ‘‘began’’ at the time when Renaissance was already in full bloom. In 1580 The Story of the Most Glorious Resurrection of Our Lord came out in print. It was signed by a certain Michael from Wilkowiecko, but he was not necessarily the work’s only author. The drama narrates events after the death of Jesus of Nazareth—beginning with the scene in

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Western Drama through the Ages which Jewish priests, called bishops here, hire guards to watch His grave (Good Friday), through Christ’s descent to Hell and leading the sinners out (Easter Saturday) until Resurrection (Easter Sunday). It includes a fragment already known to us as the ‘‘visitation of the grave’’ and finally the appearance of the resurrected Teacher among his disciples at an inn in Emmaus. The whole piece consists of short scenes, alternately tragic, lyric, and comic in which a total of thirty-five characters appear. One has to admit that the author succeeds in creating convincing, deep, and individualized psycho-social portraits. For instance, the apostles themselves, ordinary and imperfect, are much like their audience. The figure of God’s son towers above all that human weakness pictured here with forgiving understanding. He is a lonely hero serving his brothers and sisters, who are unable to understand him. But, when he breaks the bread for them at the table, he is among them again as their Earthly guide. The text was created probably in the fifteenth century, as an imitation of an even older original. It is, in fact, a detailed record of a completed performance and, at the same time, appears to be a ‘‘director’s’’ version of a potential show. Drama here was clearly born of the stage and the stage was born of liturgy. Liturgy in turn resulted from imitation of history of Man, both real and mythical. In the twentieth century Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99), the famous director, employed that method again. All through the sixteenth century medieval dramatic forms, the rather uninteresting examples of which would not fit into this broad essay, dominated the already secular city theater. It was almost professional, because it was created often for monetary gain by students and finally by itinerant actors, on temporary street stages. In the mean time, as if on the side, purely literary drama developed —not entirely religious anymore, but not yet entirely humanistic. Mikolaj Rej, an unusually prolific poet, who became the father of Polish literature, because he did not know Latin very well, left behind two brilliant dramatic pieces. In 1549 his Life of Joseph came out in print. It is a Protestant parody of the Catholic faith in the form of a grotesque morality play. Four years later he published The Merchant, another morality play in the vein of Everyman, but as if topsy turvy. The protagonist is an entrepreneur, who does not fall for the papist babble about sins and good deeds, but places all his trust in the Lord, achieves his goals with hard work, which ultimately earns him eternal rest. As with all of Rej’s work, these ‘‘non-stage dialogues’’ are also characterized by colorful language, not devoid of peculiar charm, but as for the thoughts expressed in them, tolerance rather than critical analysis is in order. Finally, the time was ripe for a masterpiece. Jan Kochanowski (1530–84), an erudite humanist, but above all the most eminent poet of the Polish Renaissance, created a tragedy based on a classical foundation, constructed perfectly as a column. The story is the author’s reworking of an episode from the Trojan war but it is immediately clear that this is only a costume. The characters speak and act like

Polish Theater Poles through and through and the problems that occupy them stem from the current politics of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The situation is as follows: the conceited and hot-headed Trojan prince Paris has abducted Helen, wife of the Greek king Menelaus. Now the emissaries sent by the betrayed husband come to demand the return of the beauty, threatening an armed intervention. Everybody conducts long negotiations, which are the main part of The Dismissal of the Grecian Envoys, but in vain. The Trojans refuse, in spite of the wise counsel of Alexander, their most valiant knight. The tragedy ends with an ominous prophecy of the soothsaying princess Cassandra, who predicts war. That ending, as if broken off, with a catastrophe approaching unavoidably but still not realized, suspended above the heads of those who are to decide the fate of the kingdom, is probably the most original idea of this play, which is poetically beautiful but dramatically rather boring. The audience, of course, knows what will follow and it is as if their knowledge is written into the script. The author is not concerned with creating suspense—quite the contrary: he intends to calmly analyze and clearly picture the political and psychological causes of the potential conflict. That masterful political dialogue in verse, with choir songs and displays of rhetorical prowess in monologues, was staged in 1578 during a wedding celebration at the court of a wealthy aristocrat and influential politician, in the presence of the King himself. The poet clearly took into consideration the anticipated presence of the King and the political elite. It seems at times that (like a hundred years later at he court of Louis XIV) the characters speak directly to the audience, involving them in the discussion. One needs to remember here that the writer lived in the country in which a democratic parliament was the highest power and where kings were elected in universal vote. Therefore the audience would pass judgment in this case and the conclusion would be clear—it is not Fate who decides the fortunes of nations, but (contrary to classical tragedy) decisions resulting from the personal motives of every citizen, responsible to God and history. The nation (that is, the theatrical audience) will have to wait for another public debate of this kind until the eighteenth century. Kochanowski’s political tragedy was apparently so perfect in form and so momentous in its ideas that none of his contemporaries dared to write anything similar. Court theater, supported by rich magnates, developed soon enough, but its repertory consisted of moving images with lyrical couplets rather than serious dramatic works. At the turn of sixteenth century it was probably still difficult to make money in theater, since the only people able to make a living at writing and performing plays were Cracow students (expelled from the Academy) and seminarists (banished from the Seminary). They left behind a series of dialogues for stage, relating a story of a certain Albertus. With time, his name became a designation of a genre—short, grotesque comedies for a small cast, written in a language

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Western Drama through the Ages parodying plebeian-scholarly style and with rhymes like the clickety-clack of an old jade on cobblestone. Their central character is a curious combination of Don Quixote with a braggart soldier hailing back to Plautus. Salty dialogue and unsophisticated jokes make up the plot of those almost cabaret-like scenes. Their sole content is a process of turning a fool into a hero. A large number of those ‘‘variations on a theme’’ were created over several decades. It is this same spirit of play that gave rise to Peasant into King by Cezary Baryka. This comedy was performed in 1633 at an aristocratic court, but was clearly aimed at a less sophisticated audience. Bored soldiers find a drunk peasant asleep by the wayside and, having dressed him up in royal robes, ridicule him now with military subtlety. This subject, straight from carnival games, characterizes the dramatic imagination of the time, which still inhabits the space between church ritual and folk customs. The author tells his simple story with surprising realism and bluntness, in spite of the conventional motif, as if he were addressing a ‘‘popular’’ spectator, desiring confirmation of his social position. Baryka gives his audience a weapon that is sharp and easy to handle.

POLISH THEATER IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES Paradoxically, in spite of the lack of easily accessible theatrical spaces, in the seventeenth century drama became not so much popular as universal. Soon every Pole became a practicing theatergoer. A vast majority of noblemen’s sons were educated in colleges run by orders of Jesuits and Piarists. There, Latin and Polish plays were performed as part of a rhetorical and moral model of education. The form and content of those plays were supposed to teach the skills of debating the most serious theological and social questions. They were so successful that this use of drama became second nature to the Polish audiences who, since then, have expected from drama serious ideological debate on stage. On the other hand, popular forms of folk theater connected to church holidays developed from a grassroots level. Among others, a form called jaselka (Nativity play) appeared. It was staged at Christmas and told, in fairy tale images, the miraculous circumstances of Jesus’s birth. As time passed, the puppet theater version gained the most popularity. This medium, in combination with a serious religious subject, tempted the imagination of authors toward grotesque deformations. The popularity of those plays, usually enriched with digressions referring to current issues of the time, exceeded all expectations. Even today children in every school and kindergarten perform these szopki. In the country young people dress in costume and walk from house to house, national TV shows secular (that is, political) versions of the puppet theater with politicians in leading roles. The inherent tendency to theatricalize social life and a puppet theater with a revolving stage returned at the beginning of

Polish Theater twentieth century in The Wedding by Wyspianski—the play by which the Poles define their identity.

Baroque Style Baroque was the first ‘‘original’’ literary style in Poland. Therefore, in the eighteenth century it was still present in customs and poetry—but theater responded to change faster. That is because it was created not by landed literati scattered among manors but by a true intellectual elite, by thinkers clustered in the capital and receiving salaries. The professionals counted on applause, which they still described with restraint as ‘‘educational mission.’’ That is why they created mostly comedies—not trivial though, but manifestly ‘‘activist,’’ meaning not devoid of hope for political scandal. And so Franciszek Bohomolec (1720–84)—a cross between a courtier and a monk—appeared on the literary scene. As a professional writer and an editor of the most influential paper he was a frequent guest at the court of the last Polish king famous for his taste in sophisticated art and ladies of the same kind. Presumably, Bohomolec was able to find there an endless source of examples of the spectacular deterioration of mores. Being a Jesuit and a rhetoric teacher, he was able to transfer those with passion onto the stage in the shape of bitingly satirical comedies. In them, caricature characters once and again trip on moral prejudices and reveal the dirty lining of their fashionable garments under the eyes of an amused public, who obstinately refuse to identify with them. His works, like those of other dramatists of the time, usually owe their basic plot to popular French writers. The rest, though, is thoroughly familiar, so that the national vices pictured in them are, even today, easily recognizable by the Polish audience. It is indeed difficult to decide whether the accuracy and endurance of these comedies should be ascribed to the talents of the author or rather to the persistence of his subjects. A more modest official, but a much better writer, Franciszek Ksawery Zablocki (1754–1821) followed close in Bohomolec’s footsteps. He also adapted French comedies to Polish customs. Additionally, he introduced a new type of character, one who is impossible to judge unequivocally. This forces the viewers, both in boxes and up in the gallery, to take a stand and to become aware of the moral standards he is bound by. Fop-Suitor (staged in 1781), an excellent comedy performed to this day, depicts a young playboy and flirt who, however, does not posses either the grain of cynicism of a true libertine or the philosophical grandiloquence of Don Juan. On the contrary, the young man, free from existential fears and social ambitions, is as happy in his imperfection as most of the young gentlemen in the rows. Truly, it is hard not to like him. For the first time in the history of the Polish theater, in this graceful farce the author was able to create an ‘‘audience’s pet’’—an ambiguous and extremely vivacious character who speaks the language of everyday conversation and, at the same time, brilliant verse.

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Western Drama through the Ages In the mean time Polish drama left churches, palaces, and fairs and came out onto the streets buzzing with political debates. In 1765 the first public theater was created in Warsaw. It was a solid private institution, supported by state funds. Before its early demise, this theater was a living example of the privileged place that the theater occupies in Polish life. Plays created for the benefit of such a stage not only served as a mirror to the society, but also turned out to be an efficient tool of political intervention. Therefore, from that time until 1989 political censorship was a constant partner in their creation. The National Theater produced mostly comedies, even though nobody was in the mood for laughter. At that time Poland was slowly disappearing from the map, becoming absorbed into neighboring empires. In 1795 a real tragedy took place—and it did not play out on the stage. The final partition of Poland, which was reversed only in 1918, became the source of long lasting depression for the whole nation, but also an inexhaustible reservoir of tragic feelings. Only at this point would Polish drama prove to be a truly great and deeply original artistic achievement.

FOUR DRAMATISTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY This achievement happened thanks to four romantic poets. One of them was born in Lithuania, another in Ukraine, and all of them lived and created in Paris. The only theater where they were able to stage their plays was the imagination of their readers.1 In return, they could count on an audience devoted more than ever before or after. In time, the romantic dramas created a common sphere of ideas as symbols for the Polish nation on a scale never seen before, encompassing all classes of society and lasting practically to this day.

Adam Mickiewicz The first play in the long string of masterpieces was the most important. It has affected the imagination of Poles with the power comparable only to what Faust did to Germans. Forefathers Eve by Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) is, formally speaking, a three-part dramatic poem. It was written, in fact, as three separate dramas. It consists of over a dozen loosely connected scenes in which dreams and visions intertwine with realistic political debate, and ghosts from pagan rituals are barely distinguishable from allegorical figures from mystery and morality plays. Everything here is in confusion, beginning with numeration and chronology. The part called ‘‘the second’’ was created the earliest, in 1823. It contains a scenario of a proto-Slavic ritual summoning souls of the dead. Those spirits arrive straight from hell, the point being that those sinners (known in the neighborhood when alive) tell about their suffering in the other world and by that impart a moral lesson to the group of peasants gathered at the cemetery chapel at

Polish Theater midnight, on All Saints day. Those simple spells clearly predate the Christianization of Lithuania and Byelorussia but the moral message is thoroughly Catholic. The purpose of the ritual is to present a moral sensitivity still rooted in archaic imagination, which will become the basis for the subsequent moral choices of the protagonist, a young poet. His own spiritual adventure from the age of immaturity will play out in the following part, described by the author as ‘‘the fourth.’’ After the conclusion of the ritual, at the darkest hour before dawn, a zombie appears in the chapel. It is the dead body of a certain Gustaw, with a bleeding wound in his chest and a soul that comes to confess a grave sin—an excess of love, unrequited. However, a kitschy romance is not the essence of his threehour monologue, but an accusation the intellectual aim at nothing less than literature. With pragmatic calculation it led him to false faith in untainted love. He can be quite convincing, because this inspired monodrama is truly an explosion of poetic energy. This part, written in 1824, as the next part of recognition of the mythical scenario which shaped innate Polish sensibility, seems to be in intentional opposition to the preceding section—like paper drama versus true (sacral) reality. Thanks to the errors in his life Gustaw knows now what he needs to avoid. We watch him in the last part, described as ‘‘the third’’ when he decides to change his destiny. He is alone in a prison cell. In a dream he sees his Guardian Angel, who foretells his future—first poetic genius, then martyrdom and, finally, a spiritual leadership of the nation. After a while a young man, called here the Hermit, wakes up and immediately writes on the wall these Latin words: ‘‘Gustavus obit, hic natus Conradus’’ (Gustaw died, Konrad is born) and underneath the date: November 1st. Only now the real tragedy will take place—his own as well as that of his generation, his nation, and finally him as a new Adam, for whose immortality devils and angels will duel. In the following scene we meet Konrad’s fellow prisoners—his college friends imprisoned on a suspicion of subversive activities against the authorities (that is, a local governor of the Russian emperor). While the student-prisoners, all of them gentlemen from homes of nobility, talk, joke, drink, and sing, they unwittingly depict for viewers the real political situation and the social moods prevailing outside the prison walls. What is there? Repressions, torture, exile, executions—in one word: the everyday life of a nation condemned to death by a decision of cynical politicians of the occupying empire. At some point (all motivations here are miraculous) Konrad begins to speak like a possessed. He talks to God, even argues with Him and finally demands from Him rule of his compatriots’ souls. A poet is better suited to the role of a leader than the Omnipotent, isn’t he? Contrary to Him, the new Adam loves humanity with a true love that is humanely compassionate and, even more, knows better how to institute happiness on Earth, in place of a blatant massacre of the innocents allowed by ‘‘the one who calls himself Love.’’ Pride elevates the poet to such

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Western Drama through the Ages heights of inspiration that a spectacular comparison of God to Tsar is at the tip of his tongue . . .but the Angel takes away his consciousness in time, making the devils, already sure of their prey, furious. Now, apparently smelling sulphur, his friends call an exorcist to the unconscious poet. He is a humble young Franciscan friar named Peter. He will be able to overcome the Evil one and even more, he will be given a competitive vision, flowing from his surrender to God. He will see Poland in an allegorical icon of the Crucified—a nation which will regain for Man his innate moral perfection (the archaic one) thanks to exceptional suffering and, by following in the footsteps of the resurrected Christ, will redeem the sins of demoralized Europe. The main section of Forefathers Eve, the mythical scenario in beautiful verse (which the Poles will use like a looking glass), was created in Dresden, during several sleepless nights. Remorse was tormenting the poet who was stopped by his romances from giving up his life in the national uprising that started in November 1830 and was stomped out after a few months. Mickiewicz joined the insurgents, escaping from Russian persecution, in Paris. There, Forefathers Eve—Part Three, published immediately, gained him the rule of Polish souls.

Juliusz Slowacki This was a rule that even Juliusz Slowacki (1809–49), his most eminent competitor, a much more modern artist and a more prolific playwright, would not be able to wrestle away from him. Slowacki was a precocious scholar and a loner. Initially a dandy, later almost a saint, he began to write plays in response to the work of his rival. In 1834 he published Kordian, a story of an indecisive melancholiac who wants to give his heart to somebody, but, since he hasn’t come across anybody worthy of his egotistic love, he will give it to the nation. This enables him to overcome a personal crisis of adolescence. Before all this can take place, though, the author manifests a modern technique of psychological and symbolic playwriting. First, he creates a panoramic series of scenes from travels of the young master, and then a brilliant scene of a verbal duel between Tsar Alexander and his brother Constantine. Finally, like Konrad before him, now Kordian will have a vision. This time not in monastery cellars but at the top of Mont Blanc, the highest mountain in Europe. It is there that he receives (without special negotiations with the Lord) a detailed plan of action—which, unfortunately, fails. When at night the young man approaches the door of the Tsar’s bedroom to carry out the death sentence, he is overcome by doubts, personified as Fear and Imagination. The story of the would-be hero who, like Hamlet, was prevented by his own hypersensitivity from fulfilling a moral and political obligation, is merely the beginning of the whole series of magnificent tragedies by this romantic ‘‘Shakespeare of

Polish Theater the Slavs.’’ Indeed, Slowacki knew Elizabethan drama very well and borrowed from it freely, but, contrary to the opinions of hostile critics, his work was no ordinary imitation. Rather, it was a proof of the independence of the author, who had the courage to measure subjects with the great Englishman. Later, Slowacki would choose Caldero´n as his master and would learn from him how to create daring tragedies of religious passion, romantically set in baroque style. His extraordinary paraphrase of Caldero´n’s tragedy The Constant Prince would become, in the hands of Grotowski, one of the most magnificent achievements in the history of theater. Among his later stage works the dramatic fairy tales seem to be particularly beautiful. They mix Slavic and Celtic mythologies and by that convincingly picture common sources of all of the Western religious imagination. For example, in the monumental characters and chorus songs of Lilla Weneda (1840) one can sense the solemnity of the ‘‘northern’’ variety of the classical drama. Balladyna (1839) is the opposite—an alluring fairy tale, bloody and lighthearted in its charming naivete´. The essence of both is the unique atmosphere of a land created from literary allusions, which lead the reader deep down to the foundations of a myth about that lost civilization, still lasting in our irresistible archetypes, rather than leave him in the surface of the poem. In 1842 Slowacki experienced a deep religious crisis and began to write feverishly. These works are tragedies of passion, written in baroque style and full of special effects. The plays take their inspiration from historical events at the beginning of eighteenth century, which enable Slowacki to express a mystical message. Father Marek, written in that period, takes place on a battlefield, among explosions and flames. It is no wonder that it talks about ‘‘apocalypse time,’’ immediately before the final fall of Poland. Every line of that excellent, although hard to bear, drama seems to be shouted, so strong are the passions possessing the ‘‘Lucipheric’’ aristocrat and his demonic lover. They both are miraculously reborn under the influence of the Carmelite father who does not mince words, but is pure as Jesus himself. Similarly, Salomea’s Silver Dream (1843) is woven around love and war. It has a beautiful female role, dominating the fantastic and dreamily implausible world of mysterious signs and prophecies. Should they be believed or not? The whole play, from the very beginning, is a colorful dream. It does end in an awakening, but within another dream. The convincing psychology of Slowacki’s modern characters makes Mickiewicz’s medieval allegories seem to be behind by at least an epoch, in spite of a seeming resemblance. Slowacki, an existentialist well read in philosophy, found his inspiration in banal romances, while hanging out at Parisian theaters. In Fantazy (1841), published posthumously, Slowacki performs a synthesis of melodrama and tragedy in the salon of a provincial manor. But maybe I am wrong? Because it is an ironically cruel comedy! Ambivalence of meaning is the dominant feature of this extraordinary masterpiece of the monumental small-audience theater. It foretells the world in parentheses of twentieth century dramaturgy.

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Western Drama through the Ages What begins as a simple romance and comedy of errors concludes with a ritual of genuine sacrifice of life on the altar of love. The protagonists give up their lives for the cause at one instant and immediately afterwards they ridicule self-sacrifice. Almost nihilistic farce blends with mystical pathos. The lovers use flirtatious dialogue to lead one another to religious ecstasies. One could think that in this drama the great romantic is pulling a rug from under his own feet, trying to deconstruct an era at its peak of development.

Zygmunt Krasinski The history of Polish playwriting seems to whirl rather than flow. In 1833, on the way from Petersburg to Rome, a twenty-one year old count Zygmunt Krasinski (1812–59) wrote a masterpiece on a world scale—The Undivine Comedy. He succeeded only once. This heir of one of the most magnificent aristocratic families of Europe saw a bloody panorama of a social revolution through the reflection of his own frightened face in the coach window. His dramatic vision turned out to be a metaphysical and political autobiography. The play, written in rhythmic prose, falls into two halves and each of those into halves again. This is how one could describe a relationship between the four parts, each of which is preceded by something like an overture, introducing the subject of the following realistic events in a symbolic image. The subject matter is as much domestic as cosmic. A certain twenty-one year old aristocrat has recently married a maiden from his own sphere. Since he just had a son, his whole family gathered in the cozy palace for the christening of the little boy. And maybe they would live happily ever after, if the head of the household were not an unfulfilled poet, clearly frustrated with the family idyll. The young man succumbs to a beautiful and treacherous temptress— art. The abandoned wife will end in a psychiatric hospital and the child will inherit his father’s sensitivity. It will make him unable to see the reality, but instead will lead him to schizophrenic visions. What is one to do? One needs to grab hold of something true, or put an end to one’s life. Luckily a real opportunity do die with dignity arises—a revolution, almost a communist one. Its inevitable victory is certain—not because the simple people are morally right, but because the ruling class is none other than our Count Henryk, not a knight, but a long falling decadent nihilist. In part three we see him as a commander of the last troop of the conservative forces, defending the castle of the Holy Trinity. Soon, he will be called to negotiate capitulation with the leader of the progressive forces, named Pankracy. In disguise, he walks among fires, through the enemy encampment, talking to the people, who do not pretend to be anything other than a lustful body of a fallen civilization that has filled its empty skull. The following verbal duel between the two gods of humanity should be counted among the greatest political debates of the nascent modern democracy. In the end both opponents commit

Polish Theater suicide (but, it is real?) facing the vision of Christ-Pantocrator: one because he lost his past, which sustained him with illusions, as imagination sustains a poet and the other because he created a future which will be unlivable, like a totalitarian reality of a populist state. Each encountered nothingness face to face. Both find it in themselves, in the very essence of their lonely humanity, lacking the Other. Krasinski says clearly: Europe is headed towards barbarism. I know, because I am the essence of the Western culture. Soon after, the demise of civilization, and not a national revolt, became a dominant theme of the Polish dramaturgy. In the twentieth century it brought forth an equally singular masterpiece by Stanislawa Przybyszewska, The Danton Case (1929), beautifully filmed by Andrzej Wajda.

Cyprian Norwid The last of the great Polish romantics, maybe even a post-romantic, Cyprian Norwid (1821–83) spent most of his life as an entirely unappreciated poet. He was rediscovered decades after his death and immediately became a patron saint of avant-garde poetry. Norwid, who was a descendant of a royal family on his mother’s side, spent his days in utter poverty among the Parisian homeless and evenings in the drawing rooms of cosmopolitan aristocracy. He was invited there probably only to be ridiculed. No wonder then that the oeuvre of this brilliant artist (he was also a draftsman) and thinker is characterized by biting social irony and ability for deep psychological analysis. As a dramatist, he probably intended more than he was able to accomplish. He left behind two dramatic poems, of great literary beauty, but not very theatrical, in the style of medieval chivalric epics. Wanda (1851), called a ‘‘mystery,’’ most likely due to the mysterious images of the play, is conceived of as a great outdoor show and Krakus (1848), which its author described as ‘‘rhapsody,’’ in reality resembles a fairy tale about miracles witnessed by two brother knights lost in the woods. The archaic charm of those legends stems from their genuine depth. Their author was interested in the psychology of heroism and also in something that could be called a spiritual archeology of Christianity. His short salon comedies are more theatrical in form. They are, however, not very funny, just painfully sarcastic. The main character is usually an oversensitive young man, of exceptional moral purity, rare in that era of universal hypocrisy. Norwid’s ambition is to show the subtlest nuances of the protagonist’s psyche as an honest ‘‘actor’’ in the comedy of good manners. The audience should see stark truth, on the scale of the classical tragedy, taking place ‘‘in the wings’’ of ostensibly conventional conversation, in the words uttered in passing, in small and accidental gestures. This gives us a foretaste of comedic writing in the style of Muset and Eliot. Unfortunately, the poet’s sensitivity to language subtleties in his virtuosi dialogue in verse, usually composed of ellipsis

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Western Drama through the Ages and symbolic associations, results in a subjectivity of meaning that makes it difficult to react to the words without conducting an analysis first. It is a rare theatergoer who is able to perform one. Norwid reached the height of his dramatic abilities in The Ring of a Grand Lady (1872). It is a three act play, resembling, by its psychological and symbolic aura, Ibsen’s dramas. The main character is a poor poet, a resident of a wealthy family. One evening, during a game of a ‘‘hidden ring’’ the jewel is really lost. Who could have stolen it, if not he, the only pauper in this company? The youth is accused. Not directly, but by snide allusions—all this for the entertainment of the soulless members of the high society. The playwright also included in the main text author’s commentary, giving detailed descriptions of gestures and even of the internal life of the characters. This enables the audience to know about the characters more than they know about each other. In his numerous theoretical utterances Norwid called that type of drama ‘‘white tragedy,’’ where crimes are committed not by use of sharp objects, but words sharp as needles and the victim is not even able to die in peace—he will have to live, humiliated, among his tormentors. It seems then that what is most important here is consciously silent so that it can more clearly express itself. Norwid’s plays are based on his biography, but their edge is aimed at the deeply demoralized elites of the modern plutocratic society, in that early phase of its development, in which it was still unacceptable for ‘‘members of society’’ to admit openly that the only morality they adhered to was the ‘‘scientifically’’ proven biological struggle for survival. But the author, a contemporary of Marx and Darwin, does not succumb to the belief that the individual is determined by uncontrollable forces of nature. He believes that a human being remains metaphysically free and entirely responsible for the deeds he performs in the name of the values he believes in. That is why Norwid’s anthropological thinking leads directly from the humanistic tragedy of Kochanowski toward the moralistic prose of Joseph Conrad and the ethics of Karol Wojtyla.

COMEDY IN THE NINETEENTH AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY The beginning of the nineteenth century is the time immediately after the loss of Polish independence and the birth of a long lasting national depression. One could hardly expect comedic talent to bloom in that era. The only outstanding comedy writer of the time was Count Aleksander Fredro (1793–1876). In his youth he was a swashbuckling officer in the Napoleonic army. After his return he settled near Lvov and began a life of a landed writer. In over a dozen years he created a model and a canon of the genre which would last for over a century. The characters he created became part and parcel of the popular culture and fragments of his brilliant dialogues were assimilated into everyday language.

Polish Theater He began with virtuosi situation comedies. Their fast action, consisting of small episodes and straightforward characters, makes us laugh like modern burlesque. In 1820 he created a ‘‘love quadrangle’’ entitled Husband and Wife. The comedy, produced in the Lvov city theater, gained Fredro popularity in the eyes of the bourgeois audience and infamy under the pen of shocked patriot-romanticists, who could not forgive the former officer for such banal subject matter in such tragic times. But the divorce farce in which the ‘‘masters’’ mingle with the servants in purely erotic liaisons ends not with a happy ending, as comedy should, but, ‘‘like in real life,’’ in general distaste and a feeling of moral defeat. The comedies of our Count, even though they have you in stitches, are lined with melancholy, sarcasm, and later even misanthropy. Fredro achieved mastery in the portraiture of human types, due to skillful combination of stereotype with realism. This allowed him to surround each individual character with his or her own world of social habits, resulting in a sense that the whole Polish society is on stage, as well as, (as it turned out with time) ‘‘society’’ as such, an essence of human relationships. In Mr. Jowialski (1832) a farce about a shrewd man of letters unexpectedly turns into a caricature of that human tendency to build systems, in which the only goal is domination of all over one. The protagonist of Maiden Vows or Magnetism of the Heart (1827) is related to Fop Suitor, whom we have already met. Here he is enriched with qualities of a romantic lover, a grotesque version of Gustaw from Forefathers Eve—Part Four. The wonderfully simple plot of this comedy consists of a subterfuge the protagonist uses to test the true feelings of his beloved. To that end he pretends to be a wounded insurgent and asks her to write a letter from him to his imaginary fiance´e. And so the ‘‘magnetism of the heart’’ of the tender maiden draws out tender feelings towards the youth, who takes advantage of the situation with alacrity. The sweet lyricism of this intimate comedy is intermingled with a bitter derision of the feelings which the oversensitive poets from Paris tried to impart to the unfeeling provincial landowners. But Fredro is not cynical and devoid of patriotic exaltation. He is, however, a sober realist, with a dose of conservative pessimism. In his most famous comedy, Vengeance (1834), he built Poland in miniature, based on the old Shakespearean motif of a family feud. Here, two old gentlemen for years have been quarreling about the wall which separates them inseparably. In the characters of those two gentlemen one can most clearly distinguish Fredro’s principle of colliding whole worlds. One is a former soldier, pig-headed and thoughtlessly impulsive; the other is a typical nouveau riche, hardened and methodically cruel. When one waives his shotgun around, the other threatens a lawsuit. Both are so cowardly that all they make is wind. Under their wing the youth suffer separation and, tired of their own sentimentality, ridicule the old. Among them we see probably the most delicious character in all of Polish drama—a certain Papkin. He is a figure in part from commedia dell’arte, in part from seventeenth century ‘‘albertus’’: a braggart

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Western Drama through the Ages soldier. And maybe there would be nothing unusual in this type of character, if not for the fact that at this point in history it had become a cruel caricature of the Polish heroism. Therefore Vengeance soon became not only the most popular comedy, but also a model—a fixed reference point for future comedic works, as Mickiewicz’s Forefathers Eve was in tragedy. And there were a lot of opportunities to reflect upon this model, because all through the second half of the nineteenth century almost only comedies were written. In any case, drama in this period was inferior to novels and its main source, which was poetic imagination, almost ran dry under the influence of the enlightened ideas of the pragmatic generation of realists. Theater developed, but in the form of paid entertainment for middle class, when the audience dictates the terms. Plays, mostly comedies of manners, become mass produced, but one would be hard pressed to pick a master in that crowd. There are rather individual successes. For example Mrs. Dulska’s Morality (1907) by Gabriela Zapolska (1857–1921) remains commonly known until this day. Zapolska was a prolific second-rate writer, who came up with several better plays in the style of social-erotic satire, with a background of naturalistic anthropology, possibly due to her experiences as a professional actress. Her dramatic achievement gained such popularity that ‘‘dulszczyzna’’ (just like Grundyism) entered the Polish language as a term describing moral hypocrisy resulting not so much from cynicism as from ordinary stupidity. To tell the truth, realism has never been a strong point of Polish literature. More so, Jan August Kisielewski (1876–1918), an author who rapidly achieved success to suddenly vanish into oblivion, deserves our attention. Before he became mentally ill, he managed to write two excellent plays: In the Net (1897) and Caricatures (1898), both successfully produced in 1899. They talk about the troubles of unruly youth. Those long dramas consist almost solely of family quarrels. That allows directors, at least those equipped with scissors, to make multiple uses of the material. One can see clearly that the text was written ‘‘for theater,’’ with the author’s commentary blown up to the size of narration. What is here more interesting than the anecdote is the ‘‘situation’’ and its emotional and moral consequences. Adolf Nowaczynski (1876–1944) was a much luckier contemporary of Kisielewski. He became initially famous as an aggressive newspaper columnist and a ruthless satirist. His impetuous temperament bore fruit in the form of many excellent, well crafted and not shallow plays, which he delivered for 30 years to the city theater in Cracow. This city’s society became the subject of the author’s attacks and—by the same token—a source of his inspiration. Cracow, one of the most beautiful cities of Central Europe, the seat of a medieval university and rich in literary traditions, was maintaining that incurably high opinion of itself as the spiritual capital of the country, while a the same time displaying characteristics typical of a parochial small town. In his comedies, such as New Athens (1913) or The Spring of Nations in the Quiet Corner (1929), the author

Polish Theater mercilessly derides the presumptuous professors of the Academy and shreds to pieces the snobbish fellow artists assuming poetic poses. In his fervor he sometimes crosses the line of satire and enters the domain of lampoon but one built on language virtuosity, reminiscent of the ribald humor of Rabelais. In those times Cracow was where all was happening. The best way to get to know the artistic and at the same time pretentious climate of that Austrian town sitting in the shadow of a Renaissance castle was to visit The Little Green Balloon cabaret. In fact, it was a literary cafe´, which played host to a small theater, established in 1905. Local literati performed there, either in person or manipulating puppets. The repertoire of the cabaret consisted of songs as satirical sketches, giving a commentary on current major political events as well as city gossip. Its theatrical form harked back to szopka medieval Nativity plays. Those characters were well suited to being adapted to ‘‘social roles’’ and given the features of real and commonly known personages. In this way the grotesque cre`che became at the same time mythical and topical.

STANISLAW WYSPIANSKI In this intellectual atmosphere Stanislaw Wyspianski (1869–1907)—the greatest Polish artist of the stage—grew up. Being a son of a painter he initially followed in his father’s footsteps, creating impressive works of visual art: stained glass windows, paintings, applied art objects. After a period of study and travel and several years spent in Paris he came back to his unloved Cracow, where he found an unending source of inspiration. His work opened an epoch of entirely new dramaturgy, which flows from theater itself. Since the beginning of his artistic career Wyspianski was also an active director, stage-designer, theoretician of theater, and a writer possessing not only stage experience, but even more, the imagination of a man who sees theater in everything. He wrote fast, but each play is an original form, simple verse filled with stylized language. In the course of his short life plagued by illness, he created over a dozen great plays, which became turning points in the history of Polish literature. By uniting romantic poetic drama with concepts of ‘‘The Great Reform’’ he planted the seeds of the triumph of the Polish theater in the twentieth century. He began with plays from the lives of peasants, written in the style of symbolic realism. The Curse (1898) and Judges (1899) are constructed so perfectly and at the same time so simply that one immediately senses the noble solemnity of a Greek tragedy. Wyspianski’s first works are permeated with a pessimistic view of man as overpowered by a force greater that he. Even if that power turns out to be morally valuable, still it does degrade humanity, by depriving it of free will. His two early mythological dramas, Meleager (1899) and Protesilas and Leodamia (1899) address the same issue. In the latter one he creates an unusual female role.

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Western Drama through the Ages The heroine does not leave the stage all through the play , so that we watch almost a monodrama. Her monologue is an unceasing lamentation over the absurdity, from her point of view, of her lover’s death while, from his point of view, he died for his homeland, with joy and in glory. The subject of the play is not conflicting passions or mutually exclusive values. It is the freedom of an individual limited by the freedom of another. Freedom soon became the problem around which all thoughts of this talented dramatist began to revolve. Wyspianski was able to elevate the question of the political enslavement of his nation to the level of a great existential metaphor. According to this deeply religious Catholic, man is endowed with free will (that is, with creative activity). However, that free will becomes ‘‘bound’’ by our common tendency to spiritual sloth. As a result, the ambitious project of humanity becomes degraded and turns into passive sterility or self-destruction. Some people fabricate then a defensive idea of sacrificing one’s life in the name of a beautiful death. Wyspianski recognized this national tendency in himself and began to overcome it. In 1901 he wrote The Wedding. Its premiere, a month after the play was finished, has been considered the greatest event in the history of Polish theater. And it all started by accident. The poet was invited to the wedding of a friend, also a poet. He, like Wyspianski himself, succumbed to the trend of intelligentsia fraternizing with peasants and decided to marry a peasant girl. The wedding took place in a village by Cracow; the invited guests were ‘‘masters’’ from the city, artists, and peasant neighbors. The playwright employed here for the first time his most fruitful creative method—he drew contents out of symbolic treatment of form. In the dancing guests he saw ‘‘the whole nation,’’ the house looked a lot like a cre`che, which allowed him to connect the Polish ‘‘shepherds’’ with a metaphysical idea of renewal. The first act consists of a few dozen brilliant, short dialogues, very funny because of the clash between the alien spheres. The characters show up and disappear like puppets on a revolving scene. In the second act the innocent bride and the decadent poet, just for fun, invite a scarecrow to come inside. Since this is an enchanted night, their wish is unexpectedly granted. From then on (with all the guests already intoxicated) several of the most important guests begin to see ‘‘what’s in their soul’’—that is, fantastic figures (called dramatis personae) from ancient times of imperial Poland reproaching them for their sins, especially the sin of omission. Finally a spirit of Wernyhora appears, like a Slavic Tiresias, who calls that finally united nation to ‘‘act.’’ It is about a communal act of liberation, but also about activity of the individual. It turns out that after years of oppression military might is no longer the main threat for the oppressed. Now it is the internal inability to act, attrition of the will to fight, fear of freedom. The final dance in the enchanted circle, to the sounds of monotonous music, is an expressive metaphor of impotence. The wedding of a poet and a peasant girl really took place. It was a big event in the city. At the premiere, the protagonists

Polish Theater were watching themselves on stage; they attended, of course. At every performance we, the audience, are also guests at this wedding where the real nation weds its fantastic projection. Not for a moment does the music die down; the dancers do not stop; fantastic images and real life scenes keep rolling in front of our eyes like in a kaleidoscope. Wagneria ‘‘Gesamstkunstwerk’’ and the monumental theater of Gordon Craig has been realized here magnificently and in full; cafe´ cabaret joined a temple of art, current commentary met great metaphor. Thus the idea of teatrum mundi, recorded in the romantic drama, became fulfilled. No wonder that in the wake of the success of The Wedding the director of the city theater enlisted Wyspianski to direct Mickiewicz’s Forefathers Eve. It was the first full staging of that text so important to the Poles. The playwright performed his task very well. During his work on Forefathers Eve he found inspiration for his next masterpiece, which would be produced several months later. He again derived form from a true event and in that form he recognized a metaphor, the development of which constitutes the plot of the play. Deliverance (1902) takes place during rehearsals. That rehearsal, in that theater. Its protagonist cannot be anyone else but the hero of that drama. The actor portraying Konrad is at times himself, at times his character and at times the director and the author (that is, Wyspianski/Mickiewicz). In fact, the process of defining one’s own identity seems to constitute the story line of this unusual drama about Every-Pole. When the protagonist struggles with his own ambition and powerlessness, when he leads a dispute with 22 masks trying to take away his face, when he tries to free himself from the fictional world of literature and step out of the artificial space of theater—what is he looking for? Deliverance. The goal of each fight for freedom, the author tells his fellow Poles, is above all liberating one’s true self, free of falsehood. This play about creating a work of art tries to separate creative action from creating illusion. A modernist, unlike a romantic, does not wait for an inspiration which will possess him, but searches for a source of authenticity in the super- and subconscious. At this point in his career, Wyspianski was at the height of creative tension. He began work on the most ambitious, in his own estimation, work. November Night (1903) relates directly to the 1830 Insurrection, which for Wyspianski’s contemporaries was a painful wound but already a myth. The action takes place, as an exception, in Warsaw, in one of its beautiful parks, filled with classicist architecture and white sculptures of Greek gods. The author’s imagination immediately saw Greece here and turned the works of art into protagonists of the play. On that November night when the insurrection started, goddess Demeter brings her marble daughter Persephone into the underworld, so that she may, as it happens every year, spend the winter dying in the arms of Hades, who will send her, renewed, back to Earth in the spring. That ritual of initiation, a scenario of an Eleusian myth and a peculiar liturgy of death and resurrection are taking place simultaneously with the earthly plot, consisting of the events of that night ‘‘of

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Western Drama through the Ages triumph and death,’’ mainly songs and war cries of the insurgents. Action shifts to the city; the fire of insurrection spreads to various spots in Warsaw that serve as a backdrop and finally returns to the park, where there is a beautiful, intimate theater in the style of a Hellenic temple. That night the future leaders of the uprising are watching from the boxes. A city and works of art came to life again in his next drama, Acropolis (1904). Here, characters from Greek myths and biblical stories come down from tapestries hanging in the cathedral of the royal castle built on a hill (hence Acropolis) overlooking the city of Cracow. They are joined by sculptures from sarcophagi. All this takes place on the night of Resurrection. Paris and Helen cease to be lifeless patterns on a cloth; they love one another passionately and sensuously, because love is the life-giving force. The image of Jacob’s dream with angels climbing up the ladder to heaven comes into life by the power of faith. Finally, the first ray of light comes in through a stained glass window, bringing a message of immortality—a shared message from Greece, Jerusalem, and Cracow. More than half a century later director Grotowski saw in it a metaphor of a death camp. In his Acropolis prisoners themselves build the hill—this time a Golgotha. The myths of Western civilization will turn into ashes and purify in the crematoria. Wyspianski also wrote a series of dramas based on motifs from medieval chronicles, as if this time he wanted to bring archaeology to life. His final work was a return to a Greek myth. The Return of Odysseus (1906) was a portrait of soldier who cannot bear the blood on his hands, rather than of a shrewd hero from Troy. Much later, during the Nazi occupation, Tadeusz Kantor—a painter, scenographer, and director— chose that play to start building his vision of the monumental ‘‘theater of death.’’ Wyspianski’s vision of theater has been influential, but at the same time he was too original to have disciples and followers. We see some similarity to Wyspianski’s monumental symbolism in the work of Tadeusz Micinski (1873–1918). An esoteric poet and an occultist philosopher, he was fascinated with Russia and believed in mystical renewal of the world through a bloody revolution (which killed him). He left behind several too-long dramatic poems, consisting of a series of too-vast moving images, filled with too many symbols, decoding which requires one to become familiar with his ungraspable quasi-religious system. This probably was the reason there were very few brave ones who decided to dive into that ocean of symbols, in spite of indisputable admiration for Micinski’s ambitious imagination, straddling German expressionism and Russian symbolism. Karol Hubert Rostworowski (1877–1938), another count-dramatist, is more interesting theatrically but philosophically less extravagant. He began with symbolic legends in verse, composed with unusual precision, making use of musical forms. The title character of Juda of Carioth (1913) is a shopkeeper; blinded with material things he did not quite raise to the level of spiritual mission of Christ’s disciple. The psychological realism in the portraiture of a contemporary little man, perfectly

Polish Theater balanced with a symbolic image of magnanimous people from an epoch long gone and a masterful orchestration of collective scenes justify a little stiffness of the verse in dialogues. Caius Cesar Caligula (1917) was even more technically ambitious. It resulted from the same aristocratic contempt for base feelings. Here, the author gives an almost a virtuosic display of his compositional skills, creates dialogue fugues and tense suspensions of action and recurring motifs. The choir functions like a rhythm section and the monologues resemble concert solos. Further development of the author’s parabolic imagination resulted in excessive trust in the expressive power of allegory. The ideologically motivated universality of the message exceeded the limits of human sensitivity. Surprise (1928) turned out to be Rostworowski’s next success. It grew out of fascination with the peasant tragedies of Wyspianski and is equally classical in spirit. That ascetic story of domestic crime holds one in suspense until the very end. One feels a growing unease, as if a catastrophe has happened in the audience before it takes place on stage.

TWENTIETH CENTURY POLISH DRAMATISTS At that time the great poetic drama was an established and model form of Polish playwriting. But in the modernist period literature is not isolated anymore in the confines of a single language. Plays by two authors writing both in Polish and German became popular, not only within Polish borders. The first of those writers, Stanislaw Przybyszewski (1868–1927), the author of over a dozen expressionist-symbolic dramas, was first a friend of Strindberg, then his sexual rival. The incomprehensible popularity of his dramas at that time equals the deserved oblivion in which they are now. Their erotic intrigues almost always take place in a bourgeois home, all protagonists have ’’flames in their eyes’’ and every word reveals their ‘‘naked souls’’ in equally scantily clothed bodies. Before the unfaithful wife, picturesquely shot by the husband who is madly in love with her, dies in the arms of her remorseful lover, all of them will have enough time to discuss a system of metaphysics based on unassailable foundation of esoteric psychoanalysis. One is better off going to plays by Tadeusz Rittner (1873–1921). He was the author of psychological portraits of rebels (but only verbal) against life in a world devoid of any other material ambitions. In them he was able to create an atmosphere of reflection and an aura of subtle irony with the use of understatement, allusions, and unobtrusive symbols. His family dramas, particularly In a Little House (1904), Silly Jack (1910), Summer (1912), and Wolves of the Night (1916) turn into melancholy comedies about a society which successfully gags outstanding individuals, providing them with comfortable spots in the crowd with the use of dialogues, felicitously devoid of expressive tension. The value of those works have been proven in a surprising way—they were a starting point for a creative dissent.

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Western Drama through the Ages At this point, unnoticed, another genius arrived—Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939). A painter, playwright, novelist, art theoretician, and philosopher, Witkiewicz was one of the most colorful figures in the history of European avant-garde art. The stature of Witkacy (his self-designated name) would eventually be comparable to that of Wyspianski’s, but his contemporaries were so successfully able to marginalize the work of this man who during his lifetime was treated like a harmless lunatic, that it was not until twenty years after his death that his dramas found their way onto the stage.2 But since then, they have been performed every day in one of the theaters of the world. His dramatic work is an integral part of Witkacy’s whole philosophical system. It consists of several basic concepts. The ‘‘mystery of existence’’ reigns above all. It is revealed to a sensitive individual as a ‘‘sense of strangeness’’ of what that ‘‘specific being’’ undergoes and what he desires. It is conscious, but the character does not yet understand the ‘‘unity in multiplicity’’ that is his finite separateness and at the same time coexistence with others. Witkiewicz considered the ability to personally experience the ‘‘metaphysical sentiment’’ as the essential characteristic of humanity. This ability is disappearing in a world headed towards universal unification and mechanization of life. After the loss of religion, philosophy isolating itself from metaphysics, and the exchange of political ambitions into a technique for providing comfort and security, only art still has a chance to bring out humanity in man. In Witkacy’s thinking, theater would be the main tool for this task. Theater has a heritage of religious rite and social ritual but would be acting upon the audience with the ‘‘pure form’’ of aesthetics. That ‘‘pure form’’ dominated Witkacy’s thinking about drama. It would have to be devoid of any content that would not result from the sheer composition of stage effects. How to achieve this? Easy. It is enough to pick a human type out of pop culture, infuse it with ‘‘strangeness’’ through caricatural deformation and assign it a task of achieving ‘‘metaphysical sentiment.’’ The protagonist starts to strain, tense up, provoke, break the norms, until a strange biography of ‘‘individual being,’’ something unique and, at the same time, extremely common, results. The form of such a performance would be precisely necessary as an obsessive conspiracy theory, and the contents absolutely free (that is, psychologically and socially unmotivated). The poetics of the grotesque and the absurd appears to be an obvious choice here. Most often in his plays a character of a spiritually insatiable intellectual appears as an adventurer in the style of an ‘‘artist of life’’ surrounded by ‘‘demonic women.’’ One feature unites them—a degeneration of the social type they represent. As Daniel Gerould, an American scholar, wrote, here everything is past and wasted, the present escapes experience and there will be no future at all. Why? Because only individuals can be ‘‘alive’’ but the world is clearly intent on producing mechanically happy creatures, subject to universal control of ‘‘quasi-humans,’’

Polish Theater engineered with a biotechnological faith in the populist rule of the people. That, in short, would be Witkacy’s anarchistic-aristocratic worldview. He did not want to wait for the fulfillment of the prophecy and took his own life at the news of the pact between communist and fascist populism, intended to facilitate another partition of Poland, the land of incorrigible individualists. His last and most ‘‘normal’’ play, Shoemakers (1935), is a vivid image of those anxieties, not unlike The Undivine Comedy. It presents, in fast forward, the history of revolutionary upheavals affecting Western democracy, afraid of individualism and metaphysics and headed toward a mass society of perfect pragmatists. The shoemakers (that is, ‘‘the lowest’’) assume power in various incarnations: national socialism, people’s socialism, and finally as humanoid robots (that is, technocrats devoid of any spiritual needs). They do not have any goals anymore, nor desires. They enjoy the very mechanism of controlling the bestially happy citizens. In his play The Mother (1924) Witkiewicz most likely parodies himself as a serious philosopher. Here, a forty year old brilliant young man, who has lived for years at his mom’s expense, decides to grow up and build a career for himself in order to spread his noble, Witkacy-like social ideal. However, in the utterly demoralized world, those achieve more who are bigger scoundrels. So then his illustrious career as a spy and drug-addict terminates in a doorless and windowless room (a mother’s womb?) into which enter (from where?) executioners (that is, the society of morally healthy idiots) who severely punish him for breaking the noble norms of mediocrity. All in all Witkacy’s dramas are very difficult to outline. Their plots are as complicated as they are irrelevant. They are full of surprising and absurd events as if from a dream or a narcotic trance. Politics, eroticism, and art make an appearance in every play, but those are most clearly substitute actions. The sole aim is to intensify experiences up to the level of the desired ‘‘strangeness of being.’’ We watch the most fantastic spaces, we travel in time form the Middle Ages to the future, but it is enough to close our eyes and listen to imagine oneself in a literary cafe´, full of passionately philosophizing intellectuals. They are unable to just be, all they are able to do is to act out themselves imagined. They are aware of it, but the very awareness of the pretense blocks the authenticity of their experiences. That is what engenders the atmosphere of grotesque aggression, which will dominate Witkiewicz’s most famous plays: The Madman and the Nun, The New Deliverance, In A Small Country House, The Water Hen, The Belzebub Sonata, and The Cuttlefish. That intentional oddity, ostentatious theatricalization, and the unending grotesque are the reasons why all of the twenty-something preserved plays seem to constitute such ‘‘unity in multiplicity,’’ so much so that the protagonists could easily move around between dramas, without particular surprises. They must know one another anyway; they all come from the same milieu of degenerate almost-artists and post-artists, they speak the same language, proclaim the same views, and behave equally perversely. And all of it so they can,

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Western Drama through the Ages with suicidal desperation, discredit the highest values—values in which they are unable to believe any longer but for which they still long, surprisingly genuinely. But, is it not what performers conducting a ritual do? One can shuffle at will individual layers of the whole structure, with varying trust to each one of them. What happens on stage does not attempt to ‘‘imitate’’ anyone. It is the imitating that is happening under the eyes of the audience. Witkiewicz was read and produced as late as in the 1960s, thanks in part to Tadeusz Kantor, the creator of Cricot 2 theater and a direct disciple of the master. But the marginalization of the great lawgiver of the avant-garde was only the case as far as his public presence is concerned. His influence appeared later and with enormous power. As a matter of fact, he had many admirers among young writers. One of them was Witold Gombrowicz (1904–69), the creator of ‘‘metatheatrical dramaturgy,’’ who left behind only three plays, and each of them a masterpiece. He spent his aristocratic and artistic youth in Warsaw coffee houses, his adult years barely getting by in Buenos Aires, and his short old age as a star of European literature in France. By writing solely about himself he was able to create three dramas, four short novels, and a three-volume Diary. He hated theater, but his whole vision of the world, artistically and philosophically outlined, was full of theatrical metaphors: mask, role, pretending and authenticity, dialogue, and interpersonal play. He debuted with Ivone, Princess of Burgundy (1936), a parody of a court play. Here, a prince decides, purely for provocation, to marry the maiden considered the ugliest and stupidest in the kingdom. The girl is a perfectly passive dummy and hardly ever speaks. That turns out to be dangerous, because it will require everyone to ‘‘take a stand’’ in the face of nothing. This results in a truly amusing tragicomedy about humanity, suffering in a stiff corset of forms, but at the same time unable to exist outside of them, in the space of chaotic naked instincts which lead to crime. Immediately following the great crime of war, at ‘‘mid-life’’ Gombrowicz published a work about a crisis—a personal and European one— The Marriage (1946). The drama presents a story of creating a drama out of life, similar to The Undivine Comedy or Deliverance. It also directly refers to Forefathers Eve and indirectly to Hamlet and Faust. All of this is against the backdrop of a medieval morality play in the style of Everyman, based in form on a sacrificial liturgy. Is this a whole history of theater in one play? Or is it rather a big metaphor of theater as ‘‘form’’ (Gombrowicz’s favorite philosophical term) of human relationships, but also a relation of the man with himself and maybe even with God, even if he is already dead? For many this represented the highest and at the same time final achievement of playwriting. The Marriage is a dream of the protagonist, who dreams he has returned home from the war. His home, however, looks like a second class inn, his parents resemble a couple of brutal idiots and his old time fiance´e looks like a whore. All that was holy to him is desecrated. But maybe not, since it is just a dream? Therefore the

Polish Theater protagonist (a former knight) would like to wake up (but how does he know he is dreaming?). He decides to ‘‘test’’ (like Hamlet) what is really real and what is only a theatrical mystification of the social norms of mutual deceit, a world turned upside down, like in a carnival. He provokes, arranges situations, pretends, and demystifies—he direct life in hopes that in theater he will find (as in Witkiewicz) an experience of mystical certainty of his own existence. While doing it he climbs up the ladder, appoints his father as king, by the same token (by law of pure form) he finds himself a prince. From there it is just a step to a palace coup and then toward Him who anoints with power. By signing a peculiar pact with the powers ‘‘outside the human realm’’ (Faust) he demands the power of Creator (Mickiewicz’s Konrad) who, by the power of his (Modern Man) individuality will rule the forces of creation flowing from the source of absolute freedom (Wyspianski’s Konrad). In the finale, seeing that he is finished in his impotence (Krasinski’s Count Henry) he forces his best friend, his innocent alter ego, to commit suicide, to sacrifice a Man (liturgy) on the altar of the impossible Humanity. The protagonist (bearing a universally royal name Henry) is constantly conducting, through Hamletic monologues, an ideological debate with Christianity and humanism, the two allegories of mysterious forces eliciting a confession of his perverse sins from the soul (Everyman) of a Western man. Finally Gombrowicz wrote Operetta (1965). Its old-fashioned form of musical theater became a metaphor of a ridiculous political-philosophical debate about fashion, about something that never existed—our civilization. Which has just dramatically come to an end? The war divides the dramaturgy of Jerzy Szaniawski (1886–1970) into two parts. The first part, which was the time of his greatest triumphs, and not only on the Polish stage, contains dramas with realistic plots, with conceptual and somewhat melodramatic conflicts. They have an aura of melancholy and are full of symbolic details, gently introducing the audience to the world of poetic suggestions and subtle humor. Works such as The Sailor (1925), Attorney and Roses (1929), Pianoforte (1931), and The Bridge (1932) invite onstage provincial intelligentsia, average, lonely, and shy characters. They are emotionally weak and poorly adjusted to life in the world of pragmatic necessities. They appreciate spiritual beauty above immediate gain. They adhere to ‘‘old fashioned’’ morality, which condemns them to failure in confrontation with the cynical materialism of progressive society. They suffer existential pangs in a nook of a drawing room. This confrontation of ‘‘poetic’’ with ‘‘real’’ will become the subject of Szaniawski’s most interesting play. Two Theatres (1946), written immediately after the war, depicts, behind a veil of allusive debate about theater, the romantic fiber of the Warsaw Uprising. The sensitive author of ‘‘theater of dreams’’ will have to set the power of his subjective daydreams recorded in poetic vision against the director of ‘‘mirror theater’’ who is interested only in what can be shown.

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Western Drama through the Ages Soon after this play was staged, that literary concept became reality. Starting in 1949 only one kind of art was officially permitted: ‘‘realist in form and socialist in content.’’ The most correct and, surprisingly, quite interesting executor of that postulate was Leon Kruczkowski. Above all, his domestic political tragedy Germans (1946), but also his later works, were able to merge political correctness with talent—genuine, even though unfortunately employed. One has to admit that the soc-realistic works were often ‘‘well done’’—so much so that their authors were able to eliminate all the ambiguities which could have caught their reader’s interest. Therefore, with the coming of ‘‘the thaw’’ nonrealistic and non-socialist dramas poured out. The poetic drama, referenced here, had been developing continuously since the beginning of the century, as if insensitive to the historical changes. Eminent poets such as Boleslaw Lesmian and Jozef Czechowicz left behind dramatic texts, even if not ready for the stage. Most often they were based on fairy tale motifs, sometimes in the form of pantomime or puppet theater. They ventured into areas only seemingly marginal for the dramatic art. In reality they were close to folkloric forms, with the background of medieval and baroque traditions. The absurd miniatures of Konstanty Galczynski from the cycle The Little Theatre of Green Goose and the cabaret scripts by Jerzy Afanasjew are close to postwar grotesque surrealism. In the 1950s through the 1970s a whole school of dramaturgy emerged that made use of poetic language and the structure of the parable to describe realistic, psychologically touching existential situations. They were created by another excellent poet—Stanislaw Grochowiak (1934–76). He began with realistic, morality plays from the time of the Nazi occupation, such as Partita for the Wooden Instrument (1962), composed for the radio. His works slowly evolved into tragic parables of universal enslavement and finally achieved a symbolic emotional tension. Realism turned into the grotesque, and into a poetic parable about dying in the quintet for old men, Boys (1964). His brutally true autobiographical play about an alcoholic, Morning Fears (1965), is a passionate accusation of human nature, with its tendency to eagerly hurt one’s brother for his human weakness. The plays of Jerzy Sito, written in competent verse, as well as successful pastiches of medieval and baroque forms by Jaroslaw Marek Rymkiewicz could also be included in that category. Miron Bialoszewski’s (1922–83) ‘‘theater apart’’ is an entirely separate phenomenon. Bialoszewski, an exceedingly original author of short works based on amusing and original language play created, essentially, variations of the same ‘‘text’’ in different genres. An outstanding achievement of the theatrical mode is his series of miniatures for stage meant to be performed in the family theater at the writer’s home, by a group of friends operating puppets, mannequins or dressed in paper costumes. Those dramatis personae emerge from the wagon of a medieval theatrical troupe, from a nativity play or commedia dell’arte thrown together hastily in a cramped kitchen. In the little poems, loosely related to the aesthetics

Polish Theater of the grotesque and Dada, filled with neologisms, dialogue is split into ambiguous monosyllables or even morphemes, which, colliding , create a reality composed, like a collage, of images provoked by language associations and from objects of everyday use recognized as philosophical metaphors. At that time intimate drama and monumental theater began to drift apart. In Poland, subjected to the dictatorship of the proletariat, the stage seemed to overly expose those views and problems which the writers would rather hide in a quiet corner of a subjective world. For example, radio plays gained popularity. They were an excellent vehicle for the poetic temperament of local playwriting. One of the greatest achievements in that genre is Lalek (1961), ‘‘a play for voices’’ by Zbigniew Herbert (1924–98), a world famous poet, who left behind five dramas in all. Radio itself became thematized and metaphorical here, which imparted exceptional vividity to the story. Also some dramas by Ireneusz Iredynski (1939– 85), a writer in the type of an ‘‘angry young man,’’ were close to the nature of that medium. Iredynski tracked psychological mechanisms of violence, domination, and oppression, hidden behind the models of social behaviors which form states and even civilizations. In dramas such as Modern Nativity Play (1962) or Terrorists (1982) the author created highly formalized but realistically convincing conflicts and saturated them with an atmosphere of danger, aggression, and cruelty which elevates the plays to the level of a contemporary morality play. Equally cruel, poetic-grotesque sensitivity can be found in the works of Helmut Kajzar (1941–82), an original theater director. All of them are constructed with the use of a method deconstructing recognizable dramatic forms and reducing the plot to self-conscious scenic action. That was why they worked the best when staged by the author. The most interesting one was Paternoster (1969), a true theatrical feast, in which grease is dripping from the national kielbasa and the ritual vodka drinking gives spiritual life to the bodies firmly planted on the ground under the table. A whole galaxy of writers referring openly to the religious roots of Polish literature has been moving in the opposite direction. Roman Brandstaetter (1906–87) achieved the most interesting results in his plays based on biblical and classical motifs. His The Return of a Prodigal Son (1945) sets the biography of Rembrandt in the parable about suffering as a source of creation. You Will Not Be Killing presents a war tragedy of hero-murderers who, treating the Decalogue with deathly seriousness, condemn themselves to existence within a sphere of irresolvable moral choices. Also the static plays of Karol Wojtyla (1920–2005), the future Pope John Paul II, seem intriguing, although more philosophically then artistically. The Jeweller’s Shop (1950) contemplates the religious essence of marriage. Our God’s Brother (1960) is a piece about an artist who renounces art and devotes his life to the homeless. Finally, the mystical monodrama Radiance of Fatherhood (1978) is at the same time a poetic ‘‘improvisation’’ and a theological treatise, much indebted to romantic dramaturgy.

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Western Drama through the Ages The writings of Tadeusz Rozewicz (b. 1921), a famous poet, on the other hand, are demonstratively anti-Catholic and anti-national. It is a manifestation of unequivocal although schematic criticism of Western civilization, discredited definitively after the end of World War II. Now, the barren land of the ambitious project of Modernity has revealed emptiness and false values, which were there from the very beginning and which still support its decaying mock-up that is pop culture. The author, making original use of collage, has composed dramatic situations, most often with discontinuous plots, creating out of ready-made media cliche´s a picture of the present as a great landfill of European spirituality on the verge of nothingness. A perfect example of such a drama in a Beckettian climate is The Old Woman Broods (1968). In it, out of a woeful lamentation of Job emanates a message defending human weakness, from which flows a source of a mysterious faith in biological survival as the highest, because not illusory, value. Anthropological problems, viewed in social-historical and even existential perspective come up in Rozewicz’s dramas The Witnesses (1969), On All Fours (1971), and Death and Buried (1972). However, he always declares himself on the side of anti-metaphysics and, in spite of his reference to Christian motifs, of a desacralized view of the world. The greatest popularity was gained by The Card Index (1959) in which Rozewicz was able to unusually deftly join formal disintegration of plot continuity with deconstruction of subjective integrity of the protagonist. The main character in this static post-morality play is Hero, at once Nobody and Everyman, by the power of theatrical tradition condemned to action, to ‘‘moving the plot forward.’’ In reality he is incapable of anything more than talking about what happened to him in the universally historical drama of his own, even if written by others, biography. In his more traditional, ambiguous erotic comedy Mariage Blanc (1973) we can find reflections on the role of the artist in a post-cultural society. The Trap is an interesting psychological study of modern ideologies within the framework of Franz Kafka’s life. While Rozewicz was gaining international recognition and the position of the head avant-gardist, a more radical poet and dramatist began to slip into oblivion, in spite of his initial success. Tymoteusz Karpowicz (1921–2005) deserves a position at least equal, if not higher. It behooves the author to admit here that his judgment differs in this case from universally accepted views. Karpowicz’s dramas, just like his extremely avant-garde poetry, seem to emerge from the matter of language, as if trying to direct its semantic capabilities. The ostentatiously mediocre characters ostensibly converse with one another, but in reality their attention is focused elsewhere. Not on communication, but on the very utterance. It is as if everyone listens to what the language itself has to say to him. They allow the ‘‘revelations’’ hidden in the language to surprise them, they give in to them, respond to them, and so follow the path of fate they have forged for themselves. But this does not free them from desires, from the sense of freedom and, above

Polish Theater all, from their conscience. Morally oversensitive, but at the same time passive, they are only able to experience and understand. In those dramas of everyday life, not unlike those of Norwid, both psychologically true people and allegories of archetypal ethical attitudes perform. All of that usually happens in places so common as to be strange by their rarity in theater—in the courtyard of an old tenement house, in a taxi cab, at a railway station. It is as if the author preferred to spy on people in the city rather than peek through ‘‘the fourth wall’’ of a salon and to find archetypal scenarios in the most common behaviors, like hidden meanings in thoughtless prattle. His plays (mostly written in the 1960s and 70s), often cruel, even brutal, full of Christian symbols, make skillful use of the formal challenges of modern media. When One will Knock at the Door is meant for the radio, His Little Girl for television and others, like Wells are Everywhere, The Strange Passenger, Breake in a Travel, can be freely adapted to a director’s imagination. It is the director, and not the playwright, who is the most important person in Polish theater. That is why Polish authors rarely have big stage careers. Slawomir Mrozek (b. 1930) is a laudable exception here. ‘‘Witkacy came too late, Gombrowicz was apart, but Mrozek we have just at the right time,’’ wrote Jan Kott. He was right: that writer, draftsman, director proved to be their worthy heir. His success came quickly and was well deserved and lasting. He is the most often performed Polish author in the world, the most eminent, next to Fredro, Polish comedy writer, and the most recent of the heirs of the mainstream of Polish playwriting extending from the romantics, through Wyspianski and the avant-garde, to the author of Tango. He began as a satirist, taking the hearts of his fellow Poles by storm. They immediately recognized the essence of Polishness in his characters. But that would not condemn Mrozek to parochialism, because his precise constructions were entirely universal. An initially realistic situation, by the power of the unrelenting work of merciless reason, leads the resulting conclusions to the edge of life decisions. It is here that its absurd un-resolvability is revealed, stuck between the demand of ‘‘pure thought’’ and the expectation of ‘‘impure emotions.’’ The unceasing conflict between idealism and pragmatism discredits both extremes, without any hope for the third path. Mrozek writes from a European perspective, but based on experiences of his socialist homeland, where such tragic grotesque was commonplace. In his debut Police (1958) the totalitarian state is so efficient that it finds it necessary to support the last rebel, in order to justify the existence of its apparatus of oppression. In Out at Sea (1961) two men in a boat will not use violence to eat the third one; they unleash a political debate to convince their companion that he should sacrifice himself for the good of the majority. Mrozek writes about social mechanisms, but he does not look for them outside—instead he looks inside an individual subject to the power of ideology, stereotypes, myths,

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Western Drama through the Ages and finally archetypes. Totalitarianism and anarchy are not systems—they are inborn human deficiencies transposed onto inter-human relations. Situations in those extremely intelligent comedies, witty rather than funny, seem to be demonstratively artificially arranged; the author, without ceremony, imposes a problem requiring final decisions, involving their whole worldview on unprepared and weak characters. By that he achieves their necessary confrontation with the Absolute. This is the case in excellent Slaughterhouse (1973)—a discussion of art desiring zeal without faith, ideal without idealism, reality without truth, derived from the spirit of Witkiewicz—and in On Foot (1979)—an epic historiophilosophical treatise with Witkacy as a main character. Mrozek delights in juxtaposing opposite types and attitudes, as in Emigrants (1974) where a romantic intellectual and sentimental worker de-mystify one another’s sanctities in a windowless cellar, so that when they finally see through each other they don’t have anything left. In an amusing parable The Party (1962) with dialogues written in rhythmic prose of a folk song we see village youths standing in front of the closed door of a local dance club, trying to clear their way to culture with kicks. In The Tailor (1964) a half-savage conqueror of Rome gradually loses his brutal nobility among satin comforts of civilization, slipping softly from barbarism straight into decadence. In Vazlav (1968), stylized after one of Voltaire’s philosophical tales, we see an honest young man from the unspoiled part of the West who, trying to escape oppression and poverty, has to choose between freedom and comfort. But it is Tango (1964) which has proved to be Mrozek’s greatest triumph. This comedy, written soon after he left Poland, to which he was to return only thirty years later, poses problems derived from the heart of the Polish dramaturgy in universal perspective. Here again, as in The Wedding by Wyspianski and in The Marriage by Gombrowicz there is matrimonial drama; here again, like in The Undivine Comedy by Krasinski and Shoemakers by Witkacy we have revolution. Artur, a young idealist, inspired by the ideas of conservative moral renewal of his demoralized family (read: civilization) decides to become ritually married, so as to rebuild all the traditions in one swoop. In the course of his engagement he begins to dream (he is a descendant of Konrad, after all) about power over souls. In our times, however, reaching for it can only end up in totalitarian dictatorship. This contemporary spiritual leader is an incarnation of the whole class of sophisticated intellectuals and shifty politicians. Finally he too will lose (because he ‘‘loved too deeply’’) against the pure brutality of a simple butler. Where did he come from? No, he did not come from the outside. He lived with his masters, silently waiting his turn since the first scene. Slawomir Mrozek’s wealth of ideas has not yet run out. One of his latest plays, Love in the Crimea (1993) gives us a panorama of European spiritual history in a metaphoric image of the twentieth century history of Russia, which is, at the same time, a history of drama (that is, the human ability to dramatize history).

Polish Theater Mrozek wrote it in the country already post-historical, where contemporary ‘‘normality’’ lasts eternally. Poles have stopped seeing themselves as romantic rebels and now, in a panic, they are looking for new masks. Those are being offered by the writers ‘‘discovered’’ thanks to that changed perspective. Two ‘‘oddities’’ of Polish modern playwriting belong to this category. Marian Pankowski (b. 1919), who lives in Belgium and also writes in French, is a former soldier and an inmate of concentration camps. He expressed his experience of history not in parables about Man, but in intimate stories about unique individuals. In his many plays, written in expressive, blunt language with baroque roots, he passionately destroys the high opinion Poles have of themselves as a nation of heroic individualists by drawing their attention to their bellies and below. His opposite is Boguslaw Schaeffer (b. 1929), an excellent avant-garde composer and dizzyingly cold intellectual. Schaeffer composes short, dynamic ‘‘scenarios for actors’’ based on cultural cliche´s and language play between players posing as actors. Among his forty dramas, most became successful in German-speaking countries. In 1989, luckily for Poles, their common history ended. What is left is unending present, divided into biographies so different, that it is difficult to recognize their similarity to one model. Have they suddenly found themselves in a Spanish play by Caldero´n or a French drama by Alfred Jarry, which take place ‘‘in Poland, that is, nowhere’’? The last but one decade of the past century was marked with an intense expectation of a drama summarizing the epoch. Silence was the answer. On the other side of the Atlantic Janusz Glowacki (b. 1938) began to experience the success of his plays exploiting the plight of an immigrant, in archetypal rather than political context. In his plays Fortinbras Got Drunk, Hunting Cockroaches, and Antigone in New York he attempted to view the homeland he had lost in the perspective of the other, not yet realized one. Only in the middle of the 1990s did Poland experience an amazing outpouring of new plays. Tamara Trojanowska, a Canadian scholar of Polish modern drama sums it up by pointing out three main themes: social-political topicality, revision of national myths, and psychological exploration of mysteries of personality. She mentions names such as Ewa Lachnit and Marek Prochniewski—authors of dramatic studies of the margins of the new Polish society; Tadeusz Slobodzianek and Piotr Tomaszuk, both with a background of alternative theater, trying in different ways to tell contemporary fairy tales derived from folk lore; and finally Anna Burzynska, the creator of a new variety of post-modern comedy based on brilliant dialogue and journalistically topical subjects. At the end Trojanowska points to the three ‘‘loners’’: Lidia Amejko creatively uses the tradition of the grotesque, by engaging language into inter-textual games playing with the semiotic surface of culture; Jerzy Lukosz continues the line of de-mythologizing symbolic realism, confronting ideology with the power of personality; Artur Grabowski provokes interpersonal rituals in metaphorical dramas of communication.

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NOTES 1. The ‘‘imaginative’’ existence of those plays belongs to the certain legend. In fact fragments were ‘‘performed’’ occasionally in the form of public readings. The significant role in popularizing romantic drama in the nineteenth century was played by Helena Modrzejewska (Modjeska), also in America. 2. Some of them were actually produced— ‘‘experimentally’’ and unsuccessfully— during his lifetime.

FURTHER READING Braun, Kazimierz. A History of Polish Theater. Spheres of Captivity and Freedom. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996. Filipowicz, Halina. A Laboratory of Impure Forms. The plays of Tadeusz Rozewicz. New York-London: Greenwood Press, 1999. Gerould, Daniel. Witkacy. Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz as an Imaginative Writer. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1981. Gerould, Daniel. The Witkiewicz Reader. Edited, translated, and with introduction by Daniel Gerould. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992. Gerould, Daniel. The Mrozek Reader. New York, Grove Press, 2004. Gombrowicz, Witold. Three Plays. Translated by Krystyna Grifith-Jones, Catherine Robins and Luis Iribarne. Introductory essay by Jerzy Peterkiewicz. London-New York: Marion Boyars, 1998. Grotowski, Jerzy. Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969. Kott, Jan. Theatre Notebook 1947–67. Translated by Bolelaw Taborski. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1968. Milosz, Czeslaw. The History of Polish Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Segel, Harold B. Polish Romantic Drama. Three Plays in English. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997. Terlecki, Tymon. Stanislaw Wyspianski. Twayne’s World Authors Series. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. Trojanowska, Tamara. ‘‘New Discourses in Drama.’’ Contemporary Theatre Review 15, no. 1 (2005).


Russian Drama in the Eighteenth Century Lurana Donnels O’Malley

Although professional theater companies performed in Western Europe as early as the sixteenth century, professional theater did not develop in Russia until the eighteenth century. Despite the lack of a formal public theater in Russia before the age of Peter the Great, numerous types of theatrical activities took place in various contexts much earlier. For centuries, fairs and festivals featured such popular performance forms as dancing bears, puppet shows, and skomorokhi (minstrels). Folk dramas were particularly associated with Shrovetide and Easter celebrations. Liturgical dramas were sometimes associated with the church; for example The Fiery Furnace played in Novgorod in the sixteenth century. In the seventeenth century, a school drama emerged, first in Kiev, and later in Moscow at the Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy. Kievan cleric Simeon Polotsky wrote elaborate school plays on biblical and historical themes. Later, under Peter the Great, the Ukrainian bishop and church reformer Feofan Prokopovich also contributed to school drama repertory. Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (r. 1645–76) disliked the popular minstrels and festival performances, and issued a ban on all such forms of entertainment in 1648. But in 1672, Tsar Alexei invited a German minister named Johann Gregory to produce a pageant on the biblical story of Esther (The Play of Artexerxes) in the palace theater. Gregory’s company performed a mix of biblical stories and adaptations of Elizabethan drama. The theater fell into disuse after Tsar Alexei’s death. Peter the Great (r. 1682–25), as part of his broad effort to westernize Russia, established a short-lived public theater. Peter brought German manager

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Western Drama through the Ages Johann Kunst (and later Otto Fuerst) to perform Russian adaptations of foreign plays in a theater on Red Square from 1702 to 1707. Other nobility, including Peter’s sister Natal’ia Alekseevna, began to give private performances in their homes, for public audiences. Both Empress Anna (r. 1730–40) and Empress Elizabeth (Elizaveta, r. 1741– 62) sponsored foreign companies for elite court performances. Under Anna, three Italian companies visited, performing commedia dell’arte as well as opera and ballet. The French ballet master Jean-Baptiste Lande´ established the ballet troupe that would become the foundations of the Russian Imperial Ballet. The German director and reformer Caroline Neuber also visited. The mainstay of the court stage was French neoclassical drama; as there was as yet no Russian repertory.

THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL THEATER Empress Elizabeth created the first Russian professional theater by bringing together two key figures: Sumarokov and Volkov. Aleksandr Petrovich Sumarokov (1717–74) had begun to create a new Russian drama, performed by the students at the Cadet Academy in St. Petersburg. Some of his plays were adaptations of other material (such as his 1748 Hamlet, a neoclassical version of the Shakespeare play) and others such as Dmitri the Impostor (1771) treated Russian historical subjects. In 1755, he also wrote the libretto for the first opera in Russian, Tsefal and Prokris, with music by Francesco Araja, an Italian composer from Naples who had come to Russia in 1735 under Empress Anna. Fedor Volkov (1729–63) is considered the father of professional theater in Russia. Word of his troupe of actors in a barn theater in Iaroslavl reached Empress Elizabeth, and she invited him to St. Petersburg. Sumarokov gave some of the Iaroslavl actors training at the Cadet Academy. In 1756, by Imperial decree, Elizabeth established the Russian State Theatre, with Sumarokov providing the Russian scripts, and Volkov as the leading tragic actor. Ivan Dmitrevskii (1734– 1821), originally an actor with Volkov’s troupe in Iaroslavl, went on to become a celebrated performer in the new State Theatre, and later a teacher of actors. Tatiana Troepolskaia, an actress from the Moscow University Theatre, specialized in the leading tragic heroines of Sumarokov’s plays. Volkov died in 1763 from a cold he caught during the preparations for Catherine the Great’s coronation pageant, The Triumph of Minerva. Catherine II (r. 1762–96) saw herself as the inheritor of Peter the Great’s mantle, and shared his view of theater as a key element in the desired Westernization of Russia. Under Catherine, an Imperial Theatre School was established in 1779, and there was ample theatrical activity in both St. Petersburg and Moscow, at a variety of public, court, and private theaters. In 1771, Catherine ordered the

Russian Drama in the Eighteenth Century construction of a public theater in St. Petersburg. Originally known as the Stone Theatre, it was designed by Antonio Rinaldi and seated approximately 2,000 spectators. The building (completed in 1783) became known as the Bolshoi Theatre.

PLAYWRIGHTS Aleksandr Sumarokov continued to be the most respected writer of Russian tragedy. In 1771, he wrote Dmitri the Imposter as a vehicle for the versatile actor Ivan Dmitrevskii. Other playwrights working in this neoclassical vein were Mikhail Lomonosov, who in addition to being a playwright was a scientist and the founder of Moscow University, and Iakov Kniazhnin (Sumarokov’s son-in-law). While Sumarokov is a significant writer who made an enormous contribution to the Russian literary language, his serious plays seem overly formal today. Russian comedies of this era, however, are more lively and accessible. Since they are typically set in their own time, they reveal the language, manners, and concerns of the late eighteenth century—seen through a comic lens. The acknowledged master of comic playwriting in this period is Denis Fonvizin (1745–92). In his two great comedies, The Brigadier General (1769) and The Minor (1781), he juxtaposed the exaggerated foibles of his comic characters with the exemplary behavior of wiser and more reasonable ones. The former are far more memorable and theatrically vibrant than the latter. These broadly drawn fools, such as The Minor’s foolish young nobleman Mitrofan who rejects both work and education, anticipate the later grotesque characters of Nikolai Gogol. Russian comic operas added a musical element to the comic genre. As opposed to European comic operas, the Russian versions had a more distinct separation of scenes and songs. Masterpieces in this genre include Misfortune from a Coach (1779) by Kniazhnin with music by Vasilii Pashkevich, and The Miller as Sorceror, Deceiver, and Matchmaker (1779) by Aleksandr Ablesimov with music by Mikhail Sokolovskii. In addition to supporting theater as a tool of the Enlightenment, Catherine the Great herself was also a playwright; she authored over two dozen neoclassical comedies, historical plays, fairytale operas, and dramatic proverbs. Her most famous play, Oh, These Times! (1772), is a reworking of a play about religious hypocrisy by German playwright Gellert, with a clear nod to Molie`re. In 1785–86, she composed a trilogy of plays, including The Siberian Shaman, which parody Freemasonry, superstition, and shamanism. In some of her historical plays and one comedy, she notes that she is imitating Shakespeare, in violation of the ‘‘usual theatrical rules.’’ Most of Catherine’s plays were produced and published anonymously.

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ACTORS Others in the nobility were actively involved in running their own private estate theaters. In most cases, a nobleman forced his serfs to perform as actors, often in elaborate private theaters. The most notable of these ‘‘serf theaters’’ are two theaters at the estates of Count Peter Sheremetev: Kuskovo to the east of Moscow and later Ostankino to the north. Sheremetev’s son Nikolai was a theater aficionado who fell in love with the serf company’s lead actress, Praskovia Kovaleva, whom he had nicknamed Zhemchugova or ‘‘the Pearl.’’ He eventually freed Zhemchugova and her family, and secretly married her. Most serf actors did not receive such favors, and many were cruelly treated. Historians have noted the terrible irony of the serf actor’s existence, living enslaved but portraying kings onstage. Mikhail Shchepkin (1788–1863), who was to become the lead actor of the early nineteenth century in Russia, was born a serf, and gained his freedom by proving his acting talent in the provincial theater. He went on to act professionally in Moscow at the Maly Theatre. Shchepkin originated the roles of Famusov in Aleksandr Griboedov’s Woe From Wit (1823) and the Mayor in Gogol’s Inspector General (1826), and is considered to be the founder of the realistic acting style that was later explored and expanded by Konstantin Stanislavsky. For much of her reign Catherine the Great, inspired by the intellectual currents of the Enlightenment, allowed writers great freedoms. But toward the end of her life the events of the French Revolution made her more conservative. In 1793, possibly disturbed by the play’s anti-autocratic tone, she banned the publication of a historical drama by the late Iakov Kniazhnin, titled Vadim of Novgorod. Catherine the Great died of a stroke in 1796, and succeeding rulers were more restrictive in their regulation of theater companies and the dramatic repertory. In the nineteenth century, Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) would take Russian drama in a new direction, by rejecting French neoclassical models in favor of a more romantic approach.

FURTHER READING O’Malley, Lurana Donnels. The Dramatic World of Catherine the Great: Theatre and Politics in Eighteenth-century Russia. Aldershot, England: Ashgate Publishing, 2006. Vickery, Walter N. Alexander Pushkin, Revisted. Boston, Massachusetts: Twayne Publishing, 1992.


The Russian Drama of Anton Chekhov Ralph Lindheim

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in January of 1860 in the Ukrainian port city of Tahanrih (or, as it was known at that time, the Russian city of Taganrog). The city, located a thousand kilometers south of Moscow on an inlet of the Sea of Azov, which is itself an inlet of the Black Sea, was at one time a booming trade center in which grains, fruits, and wines were the major products bought, sold, and shipped. Yet the city’s fortunes began to wane as Chekhov grew up in the 1860s. It lost its prominence as a trading center as the more vigorous cities in Ukraine, such as Odessa and Rostov on the Don, lured the richer, more successful traders and merchants. And the arrival of the railroad proved disastrous to the teamsters of Chekhov’s home town; the local haulers were put out of work and no longer had the money to spend in the shops of the smaller merchants who remained, smaller merchants like Chekhov’s father. Chekhov’s family on both sides was rather remarkable. Both his grandfather on his father’s side and his maternal great grandfather were born serfs but saved enough money to purchase their freedom. Chekhov’s father Pavel became a petty merchant in Tahanrih, but he unfortunately was never successful. When his business failed in the mid-1870s, he had to move most of the family to Moscow. The traumatic loss of a family home was a situation that Chekhov was often to explore in his stories and plays. When the family left, Anton remained behind to finish the last three years of his secondary education and obtain the diploma needed for college entrance. Upon graduation, he rejoined the family bringing with him a scholarship to the University of Moscow as well as a newly generated attitude of independence and self-respect that he had developed

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Western Drama through the Ages in his three years living away from his parents and making his way in the world independently. He became the head of the household upon his arrival, since his father did not live at home and his elder brothers did not seem to care much about the family. He saw to it that he, his mother, and three younger siblings moved to a better, larger apartment, which they could afford since he had convinced two fellow students from his hometown to board with his family, and then enrolled in the Medical School of the University of Moscow, beginning a long, hard 5-year course of studies. He applied himself so earnestly that he did not get involved in extracurricular political activities, which were intense until the repression that followed the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. His only diversions from his studies, because of his friendship with some of his elder brothers’ bohemian friends, involved visits to pubs and brothels. Yet he had little spare time to devote to carousing, for he soon began moonlighting as a writer for a series of popular comic magazines and newspapers published both in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The material he provided—parodies, comic anecdotes, farcical scenes, amusing advertisements and calendar listings, cartoon captions—was all fairly conventional, as were the few serious tales and one large unwieldy play he wrote in the first stage of his career. Much of what he produced was dashed off, and yet it pleased the reading public and is in fact still popular today. But in the mid-1880s it was his more serious work that attracted the attention of influential or significant writers, who urged him to take his craft more seriously: to devote more time to his writing, and to turn his attention to more complex characters and content.

CHEKHOV’S CAREER Chekhov was not quick to respond to these urgings, for, as he put it, he considered literature his mistress and medicine his legitimate spouse. Yet though he never gave up his interest in medicine, he never acquired a large private practice, and many of the patients he treated throughout his life, especially his peasant neighbors, were treated free of charge. Gradually he came to spend more time with his mistress, although he soon escorted her to better places. He turned away from the lowbrow periodicals and began to place his writings in more important papers and journals. In 1888 he published a detailed description of a boy’s trip across the Ukrainian steppe in a major and respected Russian journal, one of the so-called ‘‘thick’’ journals that played such a prominent role in the development of Russian social thought and cultural life in the nineteenth century. From this date on there was no looking back, except for a series of amusing one-act farces that he dashed off for money and for the audiences, as he put it, ‘‘to laugh their buttons off.’’ Most of his work was written more seriously, more carefully, and

The Russian Drama of Anton Chekhov much more slowly; as one sees when comparing the 129 sketches and stories he produced in 1885 with 112 in 1886, 66 in 1887, and in 1888 only twelve. Apart from two trips—one extremely dangerous journey across Siberia to the Russian penal colony on the island of Sakhalin and a more pleasant tour of Europe—the next decade of his life was spent in European Russia where he wrote a series of short stories that won him such a reputation that he together with Tolstoy was recognized among the greatest living Russian writers. Yet in the middle of the 1890s the symptoms of tuberculosis, which he had not taken seriously for about ten years, announced themselves undeniably. He had to be hospitalized for a complete checkup, and the examination revealed an advanced case of the disease in both lungs. The need to convalesce slowed him down considerably, and he was ordered not to spend the harsh winters in central Russia. The winter of 1897–98 found him in Nice where he indignantly followed the events surrounding the reopening of the Dreyfus affair. Upon his return to Russia his health deteriorated, and he was forced to settle in the Crimea for most of the year and cut down on the time and effort he devoted to his writing. The decrease in the quantity of his creative output was certainly attributable to the physical toll of his disease, but the quality of his work was little affected, and it may be argued that he produced his finest works in the last years of his life. His death in 1904 at age 44 ended a brilliant but short literary career of only 25 years. Outside of Russia his dramatic output, at least the four major plays and the earlier Ivanov, is perhaps better known than his fiction. In the first twelve years of his writing career Chekhov wrote a few plays of varying quality but he fully blossomed as a playwright in the middle of the 1890s when he wrote The Seagull and transformed an earlier unsuccessful play into what we now know as Uncle Vanya. The sympathetic and acclaimed productions of these plays in 1898 by the Moscow Art Theatre, a theatrical company formed by the soon to be world famous director Konstantin Stanislavsky and his friend and associate Vladimir Nemorovich-Danchenko, together with a love affair with Olga Knipper, the troupe’s leading lady whom Chekhov married in 1901, prompted Chekhov to write his best plays, The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard, for this company and its able corps of actors. Though his relationship with Stanislavsky was far from untroubled, the successes of the Moscow Art Theatre at home and on tour in Europe and America, together with a later series of distinguished productions of Chekhov by major directors such as Jean-Louis Barrault, Giorgio Strehler, and Peter Brook, established Chekhov’s reputation as a playwright and contributed to the astounding fact that in the English-speaking world today the plays of Chekhov are performed more often than those of any other playwright except Shakespeare. Even in the percussive, argumentative and highly ideological world of contemporary theater, in Russia as well as outside it, we are surely surprised—though some of us are heartened—that these plays written just over

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WHY CHEKHOV IS IMPORTANT Actors and Chekhov One important reason for the attraction of these plays and the continuing desire to stage them is the creative challenge they pose to actors, directors, set designers, and those who devise both the lighting that bathes the sets and the sounds that provide an essential aural background for the action. Ever since Stanislavsky’s first successful staging of The Seagull in 1898, actors have been drawn to and challenged by the characters of Chekhov, whose complexity and dynamism require of the performers imaginative insight into their inner psychological worlds and demand all their professional skills to project these figures, even those who are secondary, compellingly onstage. The major characters prove more elusive, not just because of the range and depth of their emotions, which more often they conceal than reveal, but also because of their moral mobility. Beginning with Ivanov, at least its title character, Chekhov’s figures cannot be summed up quickly and neatly. In their responses, audiences must be as dynamic as the characters, evaluating positively their good, strong moments and finding reprehensible their weak, unworthy moments. In Three Sisters we can and should respond skeptically at times to the youthful impracticality of Irina, the crude words and actions of Masha, worthy of any hussar in the regiment their father headed, and the maternal watchfulness and boosterism of Olga. And yet the contrasting presence of Natasha, their sister-in-law, who can take to an unpalatable extreme the basic traits of the sisters —the immaturity of Irina becomes Natasha’s grating childishness, with particularly nasty and unjustifiable tantrums; the repressed passion of Masha, which holds her back so long from an affair with Vershinin, is refracted in Natasha’s wanton adulterousness; and the motherly affection of Olga is transformed into a saccharine, indiscriminate protectiveness for her offspring—makes us wince and appreciate more the sisters. In Chekhov’s final play, The Cherry Orchard, the main characters have all too often been simplistically censured or lauded, according to the ideological camps to which the critics belong, but essential to the play and the vision of the playwright is an evenhanded appreciation of the charms and decencies of his figures as well as their questionable weaknesses and failings, an understanding not only of what makes them attractive and likable but also of the

The Russian Drama of Anton Chekhov inflexible foolishness that nevertheless gives them the urge and the strength to survive, to continue living as they had done. The actors, however, must do more than simply enliven the roles they are playing; they must also establish the world in which the dramatis personae live as well as the world which exits outside of and beyond them and their concerns. The amount of ’’felt life,’’ to borrow a term from Henry James, in the plays of Chekhov is vast. Three Sisters, which traces, after a bright, hopeful beginning, several dismal years for the Prozorov sisters and their brother together with many of the people connected with their family, has an exceptionally large cast involved in a number of unhappy marriages or unions, somewhat reminiscent of the unhappy series of relationships at the heart of Seagull. The later play has four large roles for women, the sisters and Natasha, with six major roles for men. And one should not forget both the important minor parts for the nurse Anfisa and the deaf courier Ferapont, with his funny lines in three of the four acts, and the two minor officers Rode´ and Fedotik, who have few lines but are present in every act and add body and texture to the ensemble on stage. Adding to the capaciousness of Chekhov’s plays, the sense of a broad spectrum of life beyond the temporal and spatial limits of the stage to which the players are bound, are many important figures who are mentioned but never appear. Their presence is marked: sometimes feared, sometimes lauded, but always significant. To this group belongs Treplev’s father in Seagull, a talented figure mentioned only once, but whose evident lack of concern for his son seems equivalent to Arkadina’s and helps to account, in part, for Konstantin’s exhibitionistic urge to attract attention. And Vanya’s sister, the first wife of Professor Serebryakov and Sonya’s mother, is mentioned in the second and fourth acts of Uncle Vanya. Both times Sonya’s resemblance to her mother moves Vanya deeply, the second time to give up his notion of suicide. Three Sisters offers a greater number of offstage characters who never appear: the parents of the Prozorovs, whose values govern their children’s lives, the Director of Schools whom Kuligin imitates and fears, and the most powerful man in Town, Protopopov, who becomes Natasha’s lover and is probably the father of Natasha’s second child, Sofochka. Stanislavsky, by the way, wanted Protopopov to appear in the last act chasing a ball thrown out of the window by one of the children, but Chekhov insisted the character remain an unseen force. Finally, in The Cherry Orchard, Ranevskaya’s unseen lover draws her back to Paris in the end while Lopakhin often refers to his dead father, whose savage beatings, which he cannot forget, permanently scar and cripple the son. The ensemble, to which the actors in a Chekhov play must contribute, is not just a group reflecting the socio-economic realities of the age, in which the plays were written, though such has been the worthy goal of many productions. More important is the group of dramatic figures who share and explore common problems and concerns announced and firmly embedded in the texts of the plays, that

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Western Drama through the Ages is, in the particular clusters of words, images, and motifs that are explored and illuminated in the individual plays. Art and artists are important considerations for the major characters in Seagull, but it is unrequited love that so many of the suffering characters experience. And linking the realms of art and love is the ethical motif of integrity, which is unfortunately sacrificed by all the major figures except Nina, the character most identified with the fragile but beautiful bird of the title, to notoriety, to success, to aesthetic commitments that are not fully believed in, to popularity, to routine relationships even with unloved or unloving partners. The fragility of decency and beauty in the face of environmental depredation is later explored in Uncle Vanya, with the inevitable decline and selfdestructive desperation of people inhabiting a progressively depleted, rural landscape announced in the following lines from the third act lecture on ecological catastrophe given Elena by Doctor Astrov: Here we’re dealing with decline resulting from a struggle for survival beyond human strength; it’s a decline caused by stagnation, ignorance, the most total absence of self-awareness, when a frostbitten, starving, sickly man, to preserve the last vestiges of life, to protect his children, instinctively, unthinkingly grabs hold of whatever can possibly satisfy his hunger, to warm himself he destroys everything with no thought of the morrow . . .1

In The Three Sisters almost all the characters at some time in the play utter the stock expression vse¨ ravno, applying it to themselves or others. The phrase has a range of synonymous meanings ‘‘I’’—or one could add a different subject—‘‘don’t care,’’ ‘‘it’s all the same to me’’—or another indirect object—‘‘what’s the use?’’ ‘‘it makes no difference’’ But it is the thematic issue of indifference binding all the possible variations of this phrase that lies at the heart of the play. Even the dream of Moscow, the symbol of a useful, fulfilling, purposeful existence elsewhere, shared by the three sisters and their brother, encourages them not to concern themselves with what happens around them in the large provincial city where they live. They, too, succumb to indifference, though the sisters do not fall as deeply as the men and do finally attempt a not necessarily successful or painless escape. And for his last play Chekhov places the idea of change at its heart. The orchard itself stands as a symbol for a change in time or history since so many of the characters talk about and view the orchard as either a means or a hindrance to alterations they want to make in their lives, as a model to be restored, renovated, or renounced.

Directors and Chekhov Directors, too, are stimulated by the texts of the plays to aid their performers to explore the subtle and not so subtle depths of the characters they portray, to help their actors establish appropriate gestures, to translate psychology into motion or

The Russian Drama of Anton Chekhov stillness, to generate a shared emotion or mood, and—this is very important in any Chekhov play—to devise choreographic movements and groupings that sculpt the multidimensionality of the Chekhovian stage. One could recall in this context the breathtaking entrance of Ranevskaya and her entourage in the first act de´file´, the first of many processions in The Cherry Orchard, where the audience is engulfed by a sudden and progressive surge of energy and vitality, beginning with offstage sounds and then sweeping onstage to overwhelm the sleepy, early morning torpidity suggested by the opening of the play. Or consider the tableaus so characteristic of Three Sisters. One can never forget the effect in the opening act when, all of a sudden, a photo is taken of the festive crowd celebrating Irina’s nameday, and the many merry and lively figures at the table in the back of the stage or on the side freeze and assume the rigid, unnatural to our modern eyes, ceremonial poses characteristic of people sitting for a nineteenth century daguerreotype. But tableaus are at the core of the entire play, with the contrast between the opening scene and the closing suggestive of the movement of the entire play. As the curtain rises on Act I, before a word is spoken, the three sisters are seen in different parts of the room, wearing different colored dresses, posing in different ways that brings out differences in age, emotional and psychological state or condition, and occupation. Yet as soon becomes obvious in the first act, no matter how different they appear, they have so much in common: their tastes and sympathies and values are one. But at the end of the play, where the three of them are huddled together, supporting each other as they face a bitter future and standing as a group in contrast to the men left on stage, their brother, Masha’s husband, and the old doctor Chebutykin, we sense that their union is more apparent than real and that each is about to go her separate way. The controlled though muted and understated integration or orchestration of a spectrum of stage effects—another feature of the Chekhovian theater a director must create—is best illustrated by the concluding scene from Uncle Vanya, the darkest of Chekhov’s plays. Here a powerful though devastating counterpoint in position, speech, posture and sound between the main characters, Sonya and Vanya, whose body language and voices graphically illustrate the explosion of their hopes and dreams for a new and better life, and the sleepy satisfaction of the secondary figures, Vanya’s mother, the parasite Telegin, and the peasant nurse Marina. The latter figures are happy that life is returning to a routine that had been disrupted. And they signal their satisfaction through the background sounds of what are for them normal everyday activities: Telegin strums his guitar, the nurse knits and her needles click against each other, while Vanya’s mother does what she has so often done before, and we hear the scratching of her pen as she copies out or comments on some articles from a liberal journal. The sights and sounds of resumed normality clashes jarringly with the hopelessness projected by the slumped figure of Vanya and the exhaustion undercutting Sonya’s

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Western Drama through the Ages religious affirmation of an afterlife that will compensate them for their misery in this world. Similarly, the third act of Three Sisters focuses on the weariness of the main characters in the early morning, but there is a different spectrum of reactions to both the external fire, destroying much of their city, and a more powerful internal holocaust, devastating old illusions so desperately clung to and, for at least two of them, inspiring new affirmations to be seized, even if for the moment.

Set Designers and Chekhov The role offered by Chekhov to set designers and other members of the creative team collaborating with the directors and actors and contributing to the impact of a single act or to the contrast between two adjoining acts or to the movement of a whole evening in the theater cannot be underplayed. The magic lake of The Seagull must be seen differently in Acts I and II, and its presence must continue to be sensed in the final two acts. Similarly a sharp contrast must be palpable between the outer two acts of light in Three Sisters, where Natasha enters late and thus plays a minor part, with the middle two acts of darkness, in which Natasha enters early and her stinginess—she is ever on the watch for candles burning without any purpose—does much to set the tone. She even accentuates the darkness of Act III by wandering across the stage with a candle. Time itself —four years pass between the opening and closing of Three Sisters—is one of the important themes catalogued before our eyes by the sets and costumes and lighting designs. And finally in The Cherry Orchard, the march of time is reflected in the second act setting where there are some old tombstones scattered about the set, and the light in this act gradually darkens with the passage of evening into night making palpable time’s inexorability. As does the contrast in the settings of the first and last acts, which take place in the same room but is seen in the closing scenes with the walls stripped, the furniture reduced and covered, and suitcases, trunks, and bundles scattered in the back.

Universal Themes in Chekhov Another reason for the longevity of his plays and for their continued appeal to theater people and their audiences is their retention of familiar and conventional features exploited in nineteenth century melodrama, realistic drama and prose fiction, if not much of the dramatic literature of the Western tradition. A traditional arrival-departure scheme is used or slightly altered in all the major plays to give a skeletal shape to the whole structure, and it should be clear that Chekhov’s structures are not as shapeless as those who argue for his modernity insist. Also welcomingly familiar to an audience is the motif of generational conflict that

The Russian Drama of Anton Chekhov modulates into The Seagull’s family explosions and the harsh quarrels between the entrenched aesthetic traditionalists and the combative innovators. Another predictable variant of the central issue of conflict are the class tensions on the surface of both Three Sisters and Cherry Orchard. As noted earlier, the conventional melodramatic situation of a family facing the loss of the family homestead is a particular obsession of Chekhov; it is threatened in Uncle Vanya and actually occurs in the last plays. In Three Sisters, Natasha progressively takes control over the Prozorov house room by room, and in the last act she has moved outside and threatens nature itself, promising to cut down the trees and replace them with fragrant annuals. And in The Cherry Orchard the family estate is purchased by the merchant who grew up on the property as a serf. But as the last play makes so abundantly clear, the traditional situation is not treated in conventionally melodramatic terms. The rich merchant, Lopakhin, who eventually buys the estate and oversees the departure of the bankrupt owners, turns out to be quite a decent fellow so different from the dark, rapacious figures from the merchant class in the melodramatic plays of Alexander Ostrovsky, the major Russian playwright of the middle of the nineteenth century. As for the heroes who lose their property, Madame Ranevskaya and her brother Gaev are far from saintly passive creatures victimized by external, malevolent forces. Not only does the play subvert certain melodramatic cliche´s, it downplays much that is conventionally dramatic. Many of the play’s exciting events take place off stage, behind the scenes: Ranevskaya’s lurid love affairs, Trofimov’s political activities leading to his expulsion from university, and the critical auction, at which the estate is sold to Lopakhin, are not shown but are only reported or hinted at. And, as so many critics have pointed out, in this his last play Chekhov finally avoided having a gun fire either onstage or off. So it is this combination of traditional and novel, established and innovational that characterizes Chekhov’s special voice and vision as playwright and writer.

Chekhov’s Technique Technically, too, Chekhov was more of a ‘‘gentle subversive,’’ as Simon Karlinsky has called him, than a fierce experimentalist. He made use of standard devices that had so long served his fellow playwrights. Telling entrances and exits are exploited in Three Sisters. Vershinin declares that if he had his life to live over, he would do it without getting married again—thus speaks a man who has married twice—but it is at this very moment that Kulygin, that most satisfied of married men, makes his entrance. And in the same act Irina’s confession that the pessimism reflected by her and her sisters is directly related to the fact that their position of idle privilege blocked them from the healthy necessity of work, a necessity which was despised by her parents. Her words are immediately followed by the entrance of Natasha, whose parents we may assume did not share the prejudice

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Western Drama through the Ages of Irina’s parents yet nevertheless spawned a far from elegant creature whose health, energy, and fertility are not put to useful and positive ends. Moreover, Chekhov did not even hesitate to employ the most hoary but useful devices of drama, the soliloquy and the extended monologue, in which a character thinks aloud or announces or explores for himself or others his feelings and attitudes and ideas. In The Seagull each act features at least one major monologue— Konstantin’s in the first act, Trigorin’s in the second, Arkadina’s in the third, and Nina’s in the last act. Long speeches and shorter soliloquies dot the middle acts of Uncle Vanya and, of course, Sonya slowly delivers her famous poetic vision of the future in a tired voice at the end of Uncle Vanya. The same devices prove useful in Three Sisters, though here Chekhov attempts to justify the device of the monologue by making Doctor Chebutykin drunkenly spill his despair in the third act and having Andrei pour out his secret thoughts and feelings to a deaf comic servant or confess the failure of his life and marriage to an empty stage, from which two of his sisters have just retreated to rest on their beds behind screens. And this allows, once Andrei makes his exit, Chekhov to create a powerful conclusion to this act with the sisters still hidden behind screens giving disembodied voice to their desperation on a stage whose silence and emptiness reverberate almost as much as the words that are heard. Yet there were revolutionary aspects to Chekhov’s dramaturgy, again a ‘‘gentle’’ rather than aggressive modernism that was nevertheless to prove productive and influential for later drama and dramatists. Here at least three closely related features of a Chekhovian playscript are worthy of mention: subtext, fragmentation, and oscillation. Perhaps too much is made of subtext or the feelings and emotions that lie submerged beneath the spoken words. That there is a hidden range of sensations, feelings, attitudes and emotions not communicated by the logical content and flow of a character’s word is suggested by the dots in the text that suggest something is left unsaid—one translator remarked that a page from his plays looks like it is suffering from measles. And then there are the many specifically marked pauses, pregnant moments of silence. It is not always clear what lies beneath the surface, and in this way Chekhov’s subtext—mobile and at times palpably present but not fully comprehended by the speaker—is different from the psychological subtext built by dramatists before him, who made it clear to speaker and audience alike what was left unsaid. Also characteristic of Chekhov’s dialogue is a constant transition from one topic to another or one feeling to another or one person to another that seems unscripted, undetermined, reminiscent of the formlessness and fragmentation of everyday chatter. But it is not just the dialogue that give this impression; even the monologues are characterized by deviations, deflections, or digressions. Sudden, unexpected emotional outbursts explode in the middle of a conversation, addressed to no one in particular, but they, too, are suddenly and unexpectedly

The Russian Drama of Anton Chekhov squelched with a return to everyday trivia, a turn from the lyrical to the banal, which, in its turn, is itself incapable of being sustained for more than a moment. Ranevskaya in the first act of Cherry Orchard offers the following short monologue that displays her emotion at returning home, both to Russia and to her estate: Can really be I sitting here? Laughs. I feel like dancing, waving my arms about. Covers her face with her hands. But maybe I am dreaming! God knows I love my country, I love it tenderly; I couldn’t look out of the window in the train, I kept crying so. Through tears. But I must have my coffee. Thank you, Firs, thank you, dear old man. I’m so happy that you’re still alive.

The major, extended monologues in the play, Ranevskaya’s recounting of her sins in the second act and Lopakhin’s announcement that he is the new owner of the estate in the third act fluctuate perceptibly in intonation, pitch, emotional intensity, and subject, thus at one and the same time reinforcing the apparently chaotic structure of the play but also generating a tension between the apparent simplicity and triviality of life’s surface and the hidden though not completely camouflaged depths of complex emotion. Lopakhin’s monologue is yet another opportunity for an actor to display his flexibility, for he must rapidly pass from triumphant pride to anger at his father to sorrow at the plight of the former owners and then to a deeply felt anguish at the absurd and painful social and historical process of change which all, even he the apparent victor, must endure. But then, with yet one more twist, one more display of inconsistency, Lopakhin leaves the stage proclaiming loudly and crudely, as he almost knocks over a candelabra, ‘‘I can pay for everything!’’ Even if his final words have an ironic coloration, they reveal a basic peasant mentality, with its crude belief in the power of money. It is this constant alternation between lyric and prosaic that characterizes the texture of Chekhovian dialogue and action. In every play one finds a set of poetic images or lyrical motifs capable of rousing intense emotions or reveries about the past or dreams of the future, but what generates intense heat and light is all too quickly extinguished or deflated by banal talk or inappropriate responses or unexpectedly ungainly words or movements that bring to earth a temporary flight. And in its turn the flat and dull is surprisingly succeeded by a sharp unexpected turn towards the emotional and musical. The first act conclusion of Three Sisters, for example offers a constant fluctuation between poetic delights and prosaic banter. The sound of the spinning top reminds Masha once again of two lines from Pushkin, but her recitation is immediately followed by table talk about common superstitions. And when Andrei draws Natasha away to speak of his love for her, his rhythmic emotionally tinged speech is undercut by the self-absorption of his beloved, and his passionate kiss is accompanied by the entrance of two army officers who express comic astonishment at the tender scene they encounter. The third act of The Cherry Orchard is a brilliant string of incidents or episodes highlighting in comic fashion the characters’ inability or outright failure to

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Western Drama through the Ages maintain control and consistency over their bodies and brains and words and emotions. Varya begins the act dancing tearily with the stationmaster, but a very short moment later, when she enters with Trofimov, she responds to his teasing by angrily shouting, ‘‘Mangy master!’’ And then a second later she ponders, deep in thought, how money will be found to pay the musicians. Next is the sudden transition from composure to panic, when Simeonov-Pishchik realizes that the money he needs for tomorrow has been lost, only to express outrageously joyful relief when he finds it in the lining of his jacket. Even more important transitions from one extreme to another occur in the middle of the act. Ranevskaya’s long conversation with Trofimov begins with her plea for understanding and kind words and tokens of pity: ‘‘Save me, Petya, tell me something, talk to me.’’ And a few lines later she begs, ‘‘Pity me, you good, kind fellow!’’ But when the response she wants is not forthcoming, she immediately demands the opposite, ‘‘don’t say anything, don’t say . . .’’ And a few seconds later she angrily tongue-lashes him: ‘‘you’re simply a queer fish, a comical freak!’’ But, of course, she immediately retracts her words and alters her tone when he runs off in indignation, ‘‘Petya! Wait! You absurd fellow, I was joking. Petya!’’ With his fall comes a rapid oscillation in the reactions to it heard offstage: Anya and Varya’s shocked cry of horror is immediately followed by their laughter. Whether comic or sad or a combination of the two, the failure to sustain for any length of time a topic of conversation, a tone, an attitude or emotion, even the inability to support without qualifying or altering any of the moods that the individual acts attempt to build, is one of the most important features of a Chekhovian play.

The Heart of Chekhov A final word about Chekhovian themes is in order, though many of them have already been prefigured in this treatment of Chekhov’s texts, his characters, and the vision of the world projected by the plays. To get to the heart of what he explores, the spectators must pay close attention to the words and the images repeated by the characters. Translators, therefore, should not display their ingenuity devising stylistic variants for the same word or phrase used by different characters. All in the audience must be attuned to what the characters share, which even the relationships of primary to secondary characters comment upon. But beyond the specific concerns of the individual plays, it is best to conclude by isolating time as the overriding concern of Chekhov. It may be the changes that do not occur in time that seem to weigh so heavily. In Seagull, for example, two years pass between the third and final fourth act. But what is stressed—and I do mean clearly and openly reiterated—until the arrival of Nina near the close of the play, is the lack of any significant change in the characters, in what they feel and what they do. But if there is a change in time

The Russian Drama of Anton Chekhov in the plays, it is often not substantial and it is definitely not for the better. The desperate situation of the main characters in Uncle Vanya is the one that had been building before the arrival of the Professor and his young wife. But after their departure, the heroes are even deeper into a quicksand-like situation from which they realize there is no escape. In Three Sisters, however, the final embrace of the sisters comes at a time when each is about to go her separate way, never to enter again into the house that has marked and united them for so long. When Olga voices uncertainties and doubts and lack of knowledge about their future, she repeats four times, ‘‘If only we could know.’’ Her line could also mean, ‘‘If only it could be known.’’ What a change, then, for them who at the beginning of the play were certain of their future in Moscow and could so easily judge and evaluate the men in their lives and the people in their provincial city. Yet this change need not be interpreted as a disastrous one. Finally, in The Cherry Orchard it is clear that here none of the characters do more than change superficially, but that they remain in this comedy what they were at the beginning, and even before the beginning of the play, seems paradoxically positive. Rather than accommodating themselves to and making their peace with a changing reality that will certainly diminish them, rather than submitting to the frightening pace of time and the overwhelming force of other external powers and processes that clearly demonstrate their continual instability and impotence, they, in effect, refuse to face the facts, refuse to collapse sensibly. To the end and beyond they continue to act foolishly, heeding the absurd call of their illusions. Failure may give them a moment’s pause and even momentarily overwhelm them—think here of the final embrace of Gaev and Ranevskaya, when they attempt to subdue their tears, followed by Gaev’s collapse. Yet he exits with the help of his sister, bloodied but not broken. Throughout the play they hold on, hoping against hope, expecting a miracle to happen, the estate to be saved, Lopakhin to propose to Varya, Russia to grow and prosper, when the only miraculous things in the play are Sharlotta’s parlor tricks. And, when some of these expectations are not realized, they are convinced that all is for the best and that the future will be better. Gaev will undoubtedly fail as a banker, Trofimov will probably be punished more severely for agitating among the students, Lopakhin will rush away to complete another business deal that will guarantee only material improvement (‘‘armwaving’’ is what Trofimov calls the action of Lopakhin’s hands working independently of the heart and mind), and Ranevskaya will return to her leech of a lover in Paris, relieved that the estate has been sold at auction and its burden taken from her shoulders. Their folly, projecting their strengths as well as their weaknesses, is and apparently will continue undiminished. But in this play their foolish inflexibility, their inability to change, contributes to their resiliency.

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NOTE 1. This edition may be recommended for those interested in translations that are ‘‘playable,’’ but, as with all translations of Chekhov, Senelick’s readings of the lines should be compared with other versions to incorporate the more successful renderings by other translators. One very good translation of The Cherry Orchard by Avrahm Yarmolinsky appears in The Portable Chekhov, Penguin Press.

FURTHER READING Chekhov, Anton. Anton Chekhov’s Selected Plays. A Norton Critical Edition. Translated and Edited by Laurence Senelick. New York: Norton, 2005. ———. Anton Chekhov. The Complete Plays. Translated, Edited and Annotated by Laurence Senelick. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006. ———. The Cherry Orchard. In The Portable Chekhov. Translated by Avrahm Yarmolinsky. New York: Penguin Press, 1977. Gilman, Richard. Chekhov’s Plays: An Opening into Eternity. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1995. Pitcher, Harvey. The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation. London: Chatto and Windus, 1973.


Modern Scandinavian Drama Katherine Egerton

HENRIK IBSEN AND BJØRNSTJERNE BJØRNSON The history of Scandinavian drama intertwines artists and companies from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden because of the countries’ tight political, social, and linguistic relationships. Christiania Theatre, Norway’s first professional playhouse, founded in 1827, had a Swedish-born founder and for many years, was home to a predominately Danish acting company. In its debut season, the theater put on plays that were largely French, Danish, and German, with only two pieces by Norwegian writers out of sixty performed. Early in his career, Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was sent to Copenhagen to study theater management at Denmark’s Royal Theatre, which had long been considered the preeminent home of drama in the Scandinavian countries. Through the work of Ibsen and his contemporary, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Norway emerged as a theatrical power. Because of Ibsen and the Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849–1912), Scandinavian drama remains on the world stage today despite the relative obscurity of the languages. Although Ibsen had a long career in the Norwegian theater before writing the plays which made him famous—and infamous—in Europe and America, it was his psychologically truthful social dramas that became the focal point of a revolution in dramatic art. Starting with A Doll’s House (1879) and Ghosts (1881), Ibsen’s mature masterworks changed not only the Scandinavian theater, but also had profound impacts on writers in English such as George Bernard Shaw and James Joyce. Born and raised in the Norwegian town of Skien, Ibsen left Norway in 1864 and would not return until 1891. He spent most of the intervening years, during which he would write his most celebrated plays, living in Italy and Germany. Sven Rossel writes in his History of Scandinavian Literature:

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Western Drama through the Ages 1870–1980 that ‘‘[w]hen Georg Brandes,’’ the Danish critic and theorist of modernism, ‘‘encountered Ibsen at the train station in Dresden, the latter said to him challengingly, ‘‘You go home and annoy the Danes; then I will annoy the Norwegians.’’ Annoy them he did, albeit from a comfortable distance. Modern Norway did not emerge as a separate state until 1905, and the nineteenth century in Norway was a period of emerging nationalism. This fervency affected all kinds of artistic production. After making its impact elsewhere in Europe, literary romanticism, with its predilection for historical subjects and supernatural forces, was embraced by Scandinavian artists and writers beginning in the 1840s. In Norway in particular, writers under the influence of romanticism turned to the medieval Norse sagas for material and also began to work in the spoken language of the people rather than in the Danish that had long been the language of culture and education. The first Norwegian language theater, Det Norske Teater, was founded in Bergen in 1850 by the violinist Ole Bull and others. Ibsen joined this theater as playwright-in-residence on the strength of a very romantic one-act play called The Warrior’s Barrow, and travelled to both Denmark and Germany to polish his skills in both direction and theater management. Bergen’s Norske Teater was soon followed by the Christiania Norske Theatre, which Ibsen managed between 1857 and 1862. Ibsen’s early experience emphasized theatrical spectacle, complicated sets, romantic themes, and extravagant costumes, all of which were nearly unknown in his later work, but he learned a great deal during this period about actors and audiences and the day-to-day realities of the theater, which helped him throughout his career. Ibsen wrote his first full-length play, Cataline, a drama set in ancient Rome, in 1850, but this romantic and atmospheric work was rejected by the Danish-run Christiania Theatre. Cataline remained offstage until 1881, when it was performed in Stockholm. By that time, the style of the play was well out of fashion, largely because of Ibsen’s own later triumphs, but Ibsen thought well of it and was glad to revise it for production and publication. Shortly after he left Norway in 1864, Ibsen wrote two of his best-known early plays, Brand (1866) and Peer Gynt (1867). Perhaps burned out after many hard years in the theater, during which he was often extremely poor, Ibsen wrote both of these plays for readers, rather than for audiences. Both were eventually successful both on stage and off despite rapid changes in theatrical taste. After writing Peer Gynt, a romantic verse drama in five acts with a huge cast of characters and many features difficult to envision, much less stage, Ibsen confronted European literature’s move toward naturalism directly. As he wrote to fellow playwright Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, ‘‘If I am no poet, then I shall try my luck as a photographer.’’ However, it would be Bjørnson, rather than Ibsen, who would first bring the social problem play to the stage. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (1832–1910), a prolific writer in many genres, began his career writing poems and folk tales and stories

Modern Scandinavian Drama of everyday people. He captured a middle ground between romanticism and deterministic naturalism in his writing, and also pursued a career as a critic and theater manager, following in Ibsen’s steps as theater manager. One of his more successful early works, the trilogy Sigurd Slembe (1862), was drawn from the Old Norse sagas. In the 1870s, however, Bjørnson shifted his focus away from the romantic stories and folk tales that had filled his career. Instead, writing in Rome in the early 1870s, he produced the ‘‘plays that introduced the modern problem drama in Norway,’’ The Editor (1875) and The Bankrupt (1875). The latter of these two provides an interesting counterweight to Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society, as both plays stage the conflict between social and individual morality. In Bjørnson’s version, it is the immoral man who bows to public morality, whereas in Ibsen’s plays, the process almost always works the other way around. These two plays were soon followed by The New System (1879), which strongly criticized the church, and Leonarda (1879), an even more controversial piece about the rights of a divorced woman that was widely seen as contrary to conventional morality. He also composed the lyrics to Norway’s national anthem, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1903.

A Doll’s House Thus, when Henrik Ibsen wrote A Doll’s House in 1879, he was participating in an already vibrant artistic discussion about the conflicts between society and the individual, the waning influence of the church in European society, and the rise of naturalism and social realism in art. Georg Brandes, the influential Danish critic and author of Main Currents in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century, declared that ‘‘what is alive in modern literature shows in its capacity to submit problems to debate.’’ Following The Pillars of Society (1877), one of Ibsen’s first attempts at the social problem play, Ibsen showed in A Doll’s House that the ‘‘woman problem’’ was not going to slink away without triggering massive social upheaval. A Doll’s House was first performed at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen in December, 1879, and performances soon followed in Christiania (now Oslo) and Bergen. The problem posed in A Doll’s House was that of a woman, Nora Helmer, who walks out of her home and marriage, choosing to become an autonomous adult rather than remain as a child. A Doll’s House ends on the sound of a slamming door which, as the play’s fame spread, became known as ‘‘the slam heard around the world.’’ The play opens in the Christmas season, and Nora has been shopping for her family. Her husband, Torvald, a newly-promoted bank manager, scolds her for wasting money and preaches against debt, but he can’t bear to be harsh with his darling for long. Ibsen quickly establishes Torvald and Nora’s relationship as that of an indulgent master and his pet, and when Nora begs for even more money,

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Western Drama through the Ages Torvald cannot refuse. Nora’s spendthrift ways, a legacy from her father, are part of her charm; Torvald cannot hold her responsible for serious matters while maintaining his cherished illusion that she is his ‘‘little lark twittering.’’ Soon, Nora’s old friend, Kristine Linde, arrives after a ten-year absence. Mrs. Linde tells of a harsh but expedient marriage to provide for her mother and brother, and years of work after her husband died leaving her poor again. She has come to see if Nora can secure her a job in Torvald’s bank. This reunion provides Nora with the chance to describe her own marriage and its history, including the Helmers’ early poverty and a dangerous illness of Torvald’s that necessitated a year’s recovery in a warm climate. Nora says at first that she got the money to pay for this southern sojourn from her father, but later, when Mrs. Linde condescends to Nora, telling her that ‘‘you really know so little of life’s burdens yourself. . .you’re just a child,’’ Nora reveals that she raised the money—forty-eight hundred crowns—herself. Given that it was illegal at the time for a married woman to borrow money without her husband’s consent, Mrs. Linde is dubious, but Nora coyly assures her a resourceful woman can accomplish many things. Torvald never knew the money did not come from her father, and that this is the great secret of their marriage. While Nora has been acting the pretty young thing, begging for treats, she has been scrimping and saving and even secretly earning money to repay this hidden debt. Torvald’s promotion, therefore, will give Nora financial freedom far beyond what Torvald can imagine. Two other characters enter the Helmers’ house. Doctor Rank, an old family friend and a regular visitor, occupies Torvald and so when Nils Krogstad arrives, he joins the women. Krogstad is a shifty lawyer who now works as a clerk in Torvald’s bank and has ‘‘a hand in all kinds of business.’’ Soon, Rank and Krogstad exchange places, and Rank goes off on Krogstad, calling him as a blackmailer. Krogstad, after his conversation with Torvald, leaves the house. Nora has clearly been affected by Krogstad’s presence, and soon after she is left alone, he returns. They speak of many things, including how Krogstad lost his reputation, his fears that he will lose his job at the bank in favor of Mrs. Linde, and Nora’s loan. Rank’s suspicions of Krogstad turn out to be well-founded; Krogstad is Nora’s creditor, and he knows that Nora’s loan documents show her father’s signature, dated three days after his death. Confronted with this information, Nora admits to forgery, protesting that she would have done anything to save Torvald’s life, even when his pride would have kept him from borrowing money in the same situation. Krogstad gives Nora an ultimatum: she must secure his job at the bank, or he will tell Torvald about her loan and the forgery. Krogstad assures her that the crime that ruined his career ‘‘was nothing more and nothing worse,’’ and ‘‘if I get shoved down a second time, you’re going to keep me company.’’ The first act ends when Torvald, who saw Krogstad leave, asks Nora if he begged her to plead his case. Nora, working hard to squeeze information out of Torvald while still keeping

Modern Scandinavian Drama up her childish banter, must seem unconcerned as Torvald, reveling in righteousness, condemns Krogstad. Krogstad’s very presence in his own home, Torvald declares, must morally contaminate his children, and Torvald ‘‘feel[s] physically revolted when [he’s] anywhere near such a person.’’ Throughout the second act, Nora must manage the unfolding events as best she can. In the gaiety of the Christmas season, the fashionable Helmers are going to a costume party at which Nora will dance the tarantella. Nora’s preparations set the stage for the act’s new revelations. Torvald’s past intimacy with Krogstad, an old childhood friend, complicates the situation even further. Dr. Rank also reveals himself to be ill, but wishes to spare Torvald the sight of his death, and Mrs. Linde begins to suspect that is was Rank who lent Nora the money because he loves her. There is a great deal of drama with passing letters as Torvald sends off Krogstad’s dismissal, and Krogstad leaves a letter describing Nora’s crimes in the Helmers’ locked post box. Nora desperately tries to delay Torvald’s reading of the letter by focusing his attention on her dancing as she prepares for the party. Meanwhile, Mrs. Linde has gone after Krogstad in an attempt to make him retract his charges. When Nora discovers that Krogstad, having left town, is beyond reach, she begins to count the hours before her suicide. The third act sets up two contrasting domestic scenes. The first, between Krogstad and Mrs. Linde, reveals that when she chose to marry for money, it was Krogstad she left behind. Once she explains that she only married before for the sake of her family, she offers to marry him and help raise his children. Remorseful about the letter he sent Torvald, Krogstad offers to retract it, but Mrs. Linde now believes that the lies in the Helmers’ marriage must be exposed, whatever the consequences. When Torvald reads the letter in Nora’s presence, he explodes, carrying on about how Nora has deceived him, about what this information could do to his career, how he has been betrayed. In the middle of his tirade, another letter from Krogstad arrives, apologizing for his earlier threats. Torvald is elated: ‘‘Yes, yes, it’s true! I’m saved. Nora, I’m saved!’’ Having burned the letters, Torvald turns magnanimously to Nora, offering to right all her wrongs and protect her from the cruelties of the world: You’re safe here; I’ll keep you like a hunted dove I’ve rescued out of a hawk’s claws. I’ll bring peace to your poor, shuddering heart. Gradually it’ll happen, Nora; you’ll see. Tomorrow all this will look different to you; then everything will be as it was. I won’t have to go on repeating I forgive you; you’ll feel it for yourself. How can you imagine I’d ever conceivably want to disown you—or can even blame you in any way? Ah, you don’t know a man’s heart, Nora. For a man there’s something indescribably sweet and satisfying in knowing he’s forgiven his wife—and forgiven her out of a full and open heart. It’s as if she belongs to him in two ways now: in a sense he’s given her fresh into the world again, and she’s become his wife and his child as well. From now on that’s what you’ll be to me—you little, bewildered, helpless thing.

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Western Drama through the Ages During this speech, Nora has been just offstage, changing out of her dance costume, so the audience does not get to see her reaction to Torvald’s new declarations as they are spoken. When she emerges, she is entirely transformed. She insists on confronting him as an equal, an adult, and she questions the whole basis of their marriage. Remembering her father, she tells Torvald that he ‘‘used to call me his doll-child, and he played with me the way I played with my dolls.’’ Now she sees that Torvald sees her as nothing but a child, but she understands that this makes her unfit to be either a wife or a mother. First, she must become an adult. Throughout the play, Nora has been waiting for a ‘‘miracle,’’ for Torvald to treat her as a woman and an equal rather than as a child and a toy. Once she understands that her miracle is impossible, she declares her intention to leave her home, her marriage, and her children. ‘‘I’m a human being, no less than you,’’ she says, ‘‘or anyway, I ought to try to become one.’’ Torvald appeals to religion, to morality, and to her affection for her children, but Nora remains steadfast in her determination. She absolves him of any legal responsibility for her welfare, forces an exchange of wedding rings, and gives back her house key. Torvald, now certain that she is serious, begs to be told what ‘‘miracle’’ could keep her at home. ‘‘You and I,’’ she tells him, ‘‘would both have to transform ourselves to the point that—Oh Torvald, I’ve stopped believing in miracles.’’ As she leaves the house, the offstage slamming of a door ends the play. A Doll’s House had immense social and psychological impact. The play utterly changed the drama in Europe and America as actors, writers, and audiences struggled to adapt to a newly realistic and socially relevant theater. The role of Nora made Danish actress Betty Hennings an international star, and other ambitious actresses rushed to play the part. In Germany, however, Hedwig Niemann-Raabe refused to play a Nora who would abandon her children. Although he denounced it as a terrible choice and a ‘‘barbarous outrage,’’ Ibsen opted to provide an alternate ending, in which Nora sees her sleeping children and cannot bring herself to leave, rather than see another writer change his text. ‘‘Oh, I am sinning against myself,’’ she says, ‘‘but I cannot leave them.’’ The first professional production in London, starring Janet Achurch, was mounted in 1889, and while critics were generally unimpressed, partially because the still-dominant acting style of the day was incompatible with Ibsen’s text, the actress Elizabeth Robins saw in the role a completely new kind of theater for women that she would pursue for the rest of her career. In her essay, ‘‘Ibsen and Feminism,’’ Gail Finney traces Ibsen’s interest in and sympathy with the feminist movement, noting both his socialist views and his friendship with noted Norwegian writer and feminist Camilla Collett. The play became a rallying point for advocates of socialism and feminism alike, and an amateur reading of the play in England in 1886 included both Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl Marx, and Bernard Shaw in the cast.

Modern Scandinavian Drama

Ghosts After the spectacular success of A Doll’s House, Ibsen followed with an even more controversial play. Ghosts, published in 1881 and first performed in Chicago (although not in English) in 1882, holds as its theme that children cannot escape the sins of their parents. As in The Doll’s House, the determining events in Ghosts have already occurred by the time the play opens. These are the ghosts of the title. The play follows through on the characters’ histories, and the audience is left to gape in horror as the consequences reveal themselves in Sophoclean fashion. The provincial American premiere was only one of many signs of the controversy Ghosts generated after its publication. The play was widely considered to be obscene, and J.L. Styan writes, ‘‘even well-educated people would not have the book in the house.’’ Oswald Alving, the play’s protagonist, is a young painter who has been fatally infected by his father’s misdeeds, both by a venereal disease (likely syphilis), causing him to lose his mind, and by the fact that his mother’s maid, Regine, whom he loves, is revealed to be his half-sister. Ibsen’s target in Ghosts is not Oswald or his suffering mother, Helene Alving, but the social codes and mores that forced Mrs. Alving to hides her husband’s crimes and remain in his house. ‘‘After Nora,’’ Ibsen wrote in 1882, ‘‘Mrs. Alving had to come.’’ Mrs. Alving is a Nora who left, but could not stay away. As the play opens, Mrs. Alving has just used her dead husband’s money to build an orphanage. The two other principal roles in the play are that of Engstrand, a dissolute laborer who Regine believes to be her father, and Pastor Manders, Mrs. Alving’s friend and spiritual advisor. Manders is at once overbearingly righteous and also a hypocritical buffoon. The audience soon learns that Manders was responsible for Mrs. Alving’s return to her degenerate husband. Even now, he berates her for having sent her son away as a child, although Mrs. Alving believes that removing Oswald from his father’s baleful influence was the correct thing to do. Horrified to learn that Mrs. Alving is reading freethinking literature, he convinces her not to insure the newly-built orphanage against fire, as it would reflect badly on her faith in God, and, therefore, on his reputation as a clergyman. Despite the fact that Mrs. Alving’s money cannot build two orphanages, and that Engstrand only the day before started a fire in his building-site workshop, she agrees. She is not so pliable, however, when Manders suggests that Regine return to live with Engstrand, who has asked her to preside over a seaman’s home (and likely brothel) that he wants to open in the town. Manders may have vague designs on the young woman himself, which will be difficult to fulfill as long as she lives under Mrs. Alving’s watch. When Oswald arrives on the scene, looking like the ghost of his father, he further horrifies Manders as he tells him that many of his artistic friends eschew marriage, and start their families without the blessings of the church. After Oswald

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Western Drama through the Ages leaves the room, Mrs. Alving tells Manders in a horrifyingly straightforward manner that she returned to a marriage as poisoned as the one she left; her return had no salutary effect on the Captain’s behavior. At the end of the first act, Mrs. Alving hears Regine cry out from another room, and when she investigates, she discovers that Oswald has tried to force himself on the maid, behaving toward her just as Captain Alving had to her mother. ‘‘Ghosts,’’ Mrs. Alving calls them, ‘‘Those two from the greenhouse—have come back.’’ In the second act, Mrs. Alving’s feelings about Regine change once she understands that Oswald is pursuing her; she becomes determined to send her away. Manders and Mrs. Alving continue to discuss the family’s sordid history and Manders’ own role in it, but their views on the moral questions involved remain vastly different. As George Bryan writes, ‘‘[Manders] sees his behavior as a victory; [Mrs. Alving] views it as a crime’’. Once Manders leaves and Oswald rejoins his mother, he tells her about the illness which is destroying his body and his mind. A doctor in Paris has diagnosed his disease as inherited, telling Oswald ‘‘ [r]ight from your birth, your whole system has been more or less worm-eaten.’’ Oswald, who had at that point been spared the knowledge of his father’s debaucheries, had preferred to think that he has brought this fate upon himself. Now back in his mother’s house, he wishes that his illness were his father’s, as that would lessen his self-loathing. Mrs. Alving, distraught, decides to tell her son everything and give him every chance at happiness—even Regine—but before she can speak, word comes that the Captain Alving Orphanage is going up in flames. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, Engstrand blackmails Manders, telling the pastor that he saw him carelessly throw a just-extinguished candle into some wood shavings. Mrs. Alving, still determined to be rid of her husband’s money, empowers him to dispose of the rest of it, which Manders then gives to Engstrand’s planned seaman’s home. Once Regine learns the truth about her parentage, she leaves the Alvings’ house, resentful that she has been brought up as a servant. The dying Oswald and his mother are left alone in the house, and Oswald, fearing his impending dementia, asks his mother to overdose him with morphine once he begins to lose his mind. She finally agrees, but when the attack comes, she cannot (perhaps yet) bear to kill her child. The curtain comes down as Mrs. Alving stands ‘‘staring at him in speechless horror’’ as Oswald, lost to rational thought, finally sees the sun shining on his father’s house.

Hedda Gabler and Other Ibsen Plays Ibsen followed Ghosts with several other plays in which he slowly began to replace social and psychological realism with a more mystical and symbolic universe that audiences sometimes found hard to penetrate, much less accept. An Enemy of the People (1882) and Hedda Gabler (1890) are the two later Ibsen

Modern Scandinavian Drama plays most often performed today, and they, together with A Doll’s House and Ghosts, have solidified his enduring reputation as a social realist. Other late plays in the Ibsen canon, including The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmersholm (1886), and his final play, When We Dead Awaken (1899), feature characters who, unable to find emotional fulfillment in this world, gladly leave it. Some interpreters of Ibsen’s work, such as Elizabeth Robins, saw his last play in particular as a betrayal of his earlier social ideals, but Ibsen was determined until the end of his career to write what he thought was true regardless of whether it was popular.

AUGUST STRINDBERG The career of the prolific Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849–1912) follows some of the same patterns evident in Ibsen’s; the early romanticism, a move to realistic drama that brought widespread fame, and a later transformation away from the social problem play toward new forms. In Strindberg’s case, this last stage takes its name from his 1902 work, A Dream Play. Strindberg, in the Dream plays, moves much farther into expressionism and surrealism than Ibsen had travelled, and today, these late plays form an important part of his legacy. Born in Stockholm to a prosperous merchant and a woman from a lower social class who had been his housekeeper, Strindberg attended the University of Uppsala and worked as a teacher and journalist while trying to establish himself in the theater. It was a novel that first established him as a literary success. The Red Room (1880) was celebrated for social and political insight in the wake of Sweden’s economic upheavals of the 1870s. His new fame led to the staging of his earlier play, Master Olof (1872), but it was not well received. Perceived even today as something of a misogynist, Strindberg reacted sharply to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, writing a short story of the same title in which ‘‘[o]nly the woman who wants to lead an independent life outside the family is censured.’’ In the same collection, entitled Married (1884), his novella The Reward of Virtue led to his being brought to court in Sweden on charges of blasphemy. While he was acquitted, he found the experience personally devastating, and it was followed by the first of many periods of mental instability. Heavily influenced by Emile Zola’s ‘‘Naturalism in the Theatre,’’ when he returned to writing plays, he turned to naturalism in The Father (1887), Miss Julie (1888), and The Creditors (1889). In these plays, the protagonists succumb to the cruel forces that surround them. Julie’s fate is perhaps the most tragic, as she has triggered her own downfall by allowing herself to be caught in the larger class struggle. An aristocratic young woman who falls for a servant, Jean, while at a party, Julie walks off the stage at the play’s end prepared to commit suicide.

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Western Drama through the Ages After he moved to Berlin in 1892, Strindberg became fascinated with alchemy and theosophy, eventually undergoing a religious crisis he later wrote about in the books Inferno (1897) and Legends (1898). He also wrote a dramatic version of this story in the three parts of To Damascus (1889–1904). The plays he produced after this upheaval fall into two categories: historical dramas in the Shakespearean mode such as Gustavus Vasa (1899), Gustav Adolf (1900), and Gustav III (1903); and experiments in Expressionism, including The Dance of Death (1900), A Dream Play (1902), and The Ghost Sonata (1907). Heavily symbolic, both To Damascus and A Dream Play required new modes of theatrical production in order to succeed. Strindberg eventually insisted on minimal props and sets, which the Intima Teatern in Stockholm, founded by Strindberg and the actor August Falk in 1907, achieved through both necessity and design. Seating merely 161 people, and with a playing area only twenty feet wide and thirteen feet deep, the Intima Teatern dispensed with painted scenery altogether, allowing the actors to create the spaces they inhabited. In that year, Strindberg wrote to Falk, ‘‘[w]ith simple de´cor, the really important points become evident: the personality, the part itself, the speech, the action and facial expression. . . .Yes, the spoken word is everything. . . .[T]he play can be acted anywhere.’’ Strindberg wrote five plays specifically for this space, known as the Chamber plays: The Storm, The Burned House, The Ghost Sonata, The Pelican (all in 1907), and The Black Glove (1909), although twenty-four of his plays were performed in the theater during the three years of its existence. Strindberg’s dramatic legacy can be seen in the work of many of the great twentieth century playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill, Luigi Pirandello, Tennessee Williams, Harold Pinter, and Edward Albee. In the speech he sent to be read at the Nobel Prize presentation, O’Neill wrote of Strindberg: It was reading his plays when I first started to write back in the winter of 1913–14 that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theater myself. If there is anything of lasting worth in my work, it is due to that original impulse from him, which has continued as my inspiration down all the years since then—to the ambition I received then to follow in the footsteps of his genius as worthily as my talent might permit, and with the same integrity of purpose.

Compared to the immense influence that both Ibsen and Strindberg have had on the drama, Scandinavian playwrights working later in the twentieth century have had relatively little impact on the world stage. In Sweden, the most important playwrights to follow Strindberg were Hjalmar Bergman (1883–1931) and Nobel laureate Pa¨r Lagerkvist (1891–1974), whose The Secret of Heaven (1919) follows on stylistically from To Damascus. In Denmark, playwright and pastor Kaj Munk (1889–1944), author of Herod the King (1928) and The Word (1932), wrote strong religious dramas until his death at the hands of the Gestapo during World War II.

Modern Scandinavian Drama Danish playwright Kjeld Abell (1901–61) carried on the symbolic drama in The Blue Pekingese (1954) and The Cry (1961). Today, the Norwegian playwrights Jon Fosse (b. 1959), whose plays include The Name (1995), Night Songs (1998), and Dream of Autumn (1999), and Cecilie Løveid (b. 1951), author of Barock Friise (1993) and Austria (1998), have achieved increasing prominence in many European theaters, and their work has been featured at the Ibsen Festival at Norway’s National Theatre in Oslo. In 2006, the centenary of Ibsen’s death, his work was celebrated around the world.

FURTHER READING Bryan, George F. An Ibsen Companion: A Dictionary-Guide to the Life, Works, and Critical Reception of Henrik Ibsen. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1984. Finney, Gail. ‘‘Ibsen and Feminism.’’ The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen. Edited by James McFarlane. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Ibsen, Henrick. A Doll House. In Ibsen: Four Major Plays, Volume I. Translated by Rolf Fjelde. New York: Signet Classic, 1992. ———. Ghosts. In Ibsen: Four Major Plays, Volume II. Translated by Rolf Fjelde New York: Signet Classic, 1970. Marker, Frederick and Lise-Lone Marker. The Scandinavian Theatre: A Short History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975. Rossel, Sven H. A History of Scandinavian Literature 1870–1980. Translated by Anne C. Ulmer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Shafer, Yvonne. Approaches to Teaching Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1985. Styan, J.L. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

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Southern U.S. Drama Catherine Seltzer

The theater of the American South is intimately connected to American drama in the larger sense, sharing many of its varied thematic and formal trends. However, Southern drama also can be examined as a discrete entity, one that possesses its own unique history and that is marked by a distinct aesthetic. In each of four broadly defined historical periods—the colonial era, the Civil War era, the modern era, and the contemporary era—Southern dramatists were guided by a sense of regional self-consciousness, repeatedly taking as their focus the evolving identity of the South and its relationship to American culture and political life. By examining each of these periods and considering a number of representative works, we can trace the development of Southern theater and the ideological challenges it has faced over the past two hundred and thirty years. Colonial-era Southern drama was often erratic in its production, and, in fact, much of the early eighteenth century theatrical scene in the South was comprised of European works performed by English troupes. Despite this, however, the theater held an important place in early Southern culture. Whereas Northern colonists often viewed the theater with mistrust, perceiving it as a challenge to Puritan values, Southerners embraced the idea of drama as a public source of entertainment. Moreover, the theater ultimately was incorporated into the Cavalier ideal: to attend the theater, or even to try one’s hand at playwriting, was a mark of gentility. This appreciation of theater in the South led to the creation of a number of traveling companies; the establishment of permanent theaters in important colonial centers such as Williamsburg, Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans; and, eventually, the production of work by native playwrights. Most of these works are not considered to be of exceedingly strong literary merit, but they do provide important insight into the development of the Southern culture.

Southern U.S. Drama

EARLY SOUTHERN DRAMA Early Southern playwrights often took regional themes as their focus, but while they frequently rooted their plays in depictions of local color, they also portrayed the South as making important contributions to the emerging identity of the new nation. Virginia playwright Robert Munsford (c. 1737–83) is identified as the first Southern dramatist, and while his plays were not produced in his lifetime, they speak to the importance of local politics and their role in the national ethos. The Candidates (c. 1770), a three-act play, chronicles the attempts of an earnest candidate, Mr. Wou’dbe, to be elected to the House of Burgesses. Wou’dbe is opposed by two corrupt candidates, the aptly named Sir John Toddy and Mr. Strutabout, and his fate is determined by voters of seemingly dubious judgment, the comic Mr. Guzzle and Mr. Julip among them. Munsford’s play functions most obviously as a satire of Virginia politics and, more specifically, as a condemnation of the pervasive role of alcohol in legislative proceedings, but in its satisfying resolution, in which Wou’dbe is elected, The Candidates also asserts the triumph of personal integrity and celebrates the power of democracy. Thus, although he takes aim at the folly of local politics, Munford also underscores what Wou’dbe identifies as ‘‘a spirit of independence becoming Virginians.’’ A second Virginia playwright, George Washington Park Custis (1781–1857), viewed his plays as a platform to remind his audiences of the South’s role in the birth of the new nation. The step-grandson of George Washington, Custis’s first play, the historical drama The Indian Prophecy (1827), predates the story of Washington as statesman, and instead positions him as central to the exploration of the new American land. The prophecy of the title is an Indian chief’s declaration that Washington is inextricably linked to the future of the nation. Custis’s most popular play, Pocahontas; or, The Settlers of Virginia, a National Drama (1830), is similar in its emphasis on Virginians’ importance in early American expansion. The work takes as its focus the legends surrounding Pocahontas, recounting her decision to save John Smith by offering to sacrifice herself, as well as her celebrated love affair with John Rolfe. While Pocahontas’s narrative was already highly romantic in its basic premise, Custis took a number of liberties with recorded history, highlighting the patriotism and bravery of Rolfe and Smith. The play appealed to audiences already invested in a vision of the South as a chivalric idyll, and Pocahontas both underscored the importance of Virginia in the nation’s history and linked cavalier values with American imperialism. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, Southern drama became less concerned with aligning Southern and American values and instead focused on defending the South’s position on the issue of slavery. Before the 1850s, issues of race had been relegated to minstrel shows, musical theater in which white actors depicted African American culture, relying heavily on the predominant stereotypes of the day. The minstrel shows, highly troubling in today’s context, offered

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Western Drama through the Ages white Southern audiences a voyeuristic glimpse into black life. However, as regional tensions grew in the years before the Civil War, race was not merely an object of fascination for Southern audiences, but was acknowledged as a subject of political importance. This shift can be credited in part to the popularity of Northern adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Northern productions of the play depicted the human toll of slavery in highly sentimental terms, encouraging audiences to view the North as the morally sound counterpart to the slaveholding South. While Stowe’s work was banned throughout much of the South, abolitionists hoped that toned-down versions of the play might convince Southern audiences of the horrors of slavery, and they encouraged Southern stagings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Southern versions of the play often radically altered Stowe’s message, however. In one of the most famous among them, Joseph M. Field’s (1810–56) Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life in the South as It is (1854), abolitionists are cast as absurdly misguided philanthropists who do not understand slavery but are driven by their knee-jerk mistrust of all things Southern. While Field’s depiction of Northerners is highly satirical, his depiction of the South is more sentimental: in his rendering of Stowe’s work, the slaves beg to return home to their Southern masters after their emancipation. Field’s play was followed by a slew of satiric versions of the novel by Southern playwrights, many of which were greeted by enthusiastic audiences throughout the South. Other antebellum playwrights moved away from a romanticized treatment of slavery, instead focusing on issues of states’ rights and regional identity. For example, the novelist, poet, critic, and playwright William Gilmore Simms (1806–70) saw himself as a spokesperson for secession, and his plays often echo the didactic nature of his essays, including his well-known contribution to the 1852 collection of essays, The Pro-Slavery Argument. Simms’s 1847 play, Norman Maurice; or the Man of the People, for instance, features extended arguments for the sanctioning of slavery in Missouri. The play culminates when Maurice defeats an antislavery candidate in a Senate race, establishing himself as the voice of the people; in this way, even if Maurice cannot guarantee the presence of slavery in Missouri, the fact that he is given a platform in Congress is seen as a triumph in the crusade for the preservation of states’ rights. The sectionalist fervor evident in antebellum theater spilled onto the wartime stage as well. During the Civil War, the theater became even more popular in the South as audiences sought diversions from the war, and many new theaters, acting troupes, and playwrights were born in its cauldron. James Dabney McCabe’s (1842–83) immensely popular play The Guerillas (1863) was the sort of romantic epic that Southern audiences sought. The play tells the story of the multi-generational Douglas family, each of whom bravely staves off the Northern soldiers who attack their Virginia homestead. The Guerillas includes a number of

Southern U.S. Drama Southern types—the honorable patriarch, the heroic cavalier, the revered steel magnolia, and the devoted slave—and in doing so, the play functioned to reify the South’s image of itself and to assure audiences of the continuity of Southern values.

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Yet antebellum theater’s insistence on a coherent vision of the South became untenable in the decades following the South’s defeat, and drama of the modern era is preoccupied with exploring the South’s paradoxes rather than celebrating its mythic stature. Southern drama was not alone in this shift; rather, it was part of the larger cultural movement of the Southern Renascence, a period that produced a ‘‘literature conscious of the past in the present,’’ in the words of Allen Tate. This period, generally recognized as existing from 1920 to 1950, spawned many of the South’s greatest works of fiction and poetry, and it represents a flowering of Southern drama as well, much of which is credited to the period’s three most important playwrights: Paul Green, Lillian Hellman, and Tennessee Williams. Paul Green (1894–1981), who originally was based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, wrote a number of plays for performance by the Carolina Playmakers, and later, for Group Theatre troupes in New York. Regardless of where they were staged, however, many of his best plays deal with Southern themes. While he is recognized for his treatment of folk themes, Green’s plays avoided sentimentalized depictions of Southern life and instead sought authenticity in their depiction of Southern culture, including the generally taboo subject of race relations. His 1926 play, In Abraham’s Bosom: The Biography of a Negro, was widely acclaimed and ultimately was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The play tells the story of Abe McCranie, who is half black and half white, and his attempts to build a school for African American children in a skeptical rural community. He is opposed both by whites, who see his project as threatening, and blacks, who are dismissive of the importance of education or question the effectiveness of Abe’s school. Abe grows increasingly frustrated, lashing out at lethargic students and at his half-brother, Lonnie, who leads the charge against the school. The play ends as a tragedy: Abe kills Lonnie and the school is burned down by the Klan; the promise of the improvement of race relations is destroyed along with the school. In the final phase of his career, Green turned his attention to historical drama, the most popular of which was the outdoor drama The Lost Colony (1937), a play that still is regularly performed today on Roanoke Island, North Carolina. While the outdoor dramas have not received the critical acclaim of Green’s earlier plays, they serve an important function as what Green identified as ‘‘a theatre of the people,’’ one that is free of the trappings of urban theater.

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Western Drama through the Ages Like Green, Lillian Hellman (1905–84) was interested in the role of the socially disenfranchised in Southern society. As the first important woman playwright in the South, she did not embrace the expectations of the genteel ‘‘lady writer,’’ but explored once unmentionable subjects, including bigotry, homosexuality, and industrial exploitation. One of her most well-received plays, The Little Foxes (1939), is a brutal analysis of the destructive elements of the ideologies of the New South. Set at the turn of the twentieth century, it follows the Hubbard family’s attempts to abandon their lower-class origins by entering the ruthless world of cotton manufacturing, an enterprise that preys on the poor whites and blacks of the community, pitting them against one another. The Hubbards’ greed is juxtaposed by the fragile Birdie, a once landed aristocrat who has married into the family. Birdie is helpless in the face of the Hubbards’ materialism, just as the ideals of the Old South are lost in the exaggerated capitalism of the New South. Hellman revisited the Hubbard family saga in her 1946 play, Another Part of the Forest, which traces the family’s desire for a higher status a generation earlier. These plays, along with The Children’s Hour (1934), which addresses lesbianism, and Watch on the Rhine (1941), about Nazisim, have cemented Hellman’s position as one of the South’s most important playwrights. The central figure of Southern theater, however, is unquestionably Tennessee Williams (1911–83). Just as William Faulkner’s novels serve as a touchstone of Southern fiction, Williams, a fellow Mississippian, has had an enormous impact in defining Southern drama, and, in fact, in shaping the notion of ‘‘Southernness’’ itself. Like Green and Hellman, Williams sought to explore the complex terrain of the New South, and his plays depict the simultaneous decadence and emptiness of the Southern ideal in the twentieth century. His first important play, The Glass Menagerie (1944), is not set in the South, but, in its depiction of Amanda Wingfield, a single mother who clings to the mannerisms of the Southern belle, Williams depicts the irony inherent in the notion of the Southern lady inhabiting a modern industrial landscape. The play chronicles the disintegration of the Wingfield family, as Amanda’s children, Tom and Laura, struggle to meet Amanda’s outmoded expectations for them. Much of the play revolves around Amanda’s hopes that a ‘‘gentleman caller’’ will come for the disabled and introverted Laura, and when the relationship fails to materialize as Laura had hoped, the painful reality of their situations washes over Laura and Tom. Williams identified the work as a ‘‘memory play,’’ and while the term refers in large part to Tom, who narrates the play, and his recollections of Laura’s plight, it also can be seen as underscoring the ways in which Amanda is haunted by the memories of her Southern past. Many of the same themes are explored in Williams’s 1947 Pulitzer Prizewinning masterpiece, A Streetcar Named Desire, which places at its center Blanche DuBois, perhaps Southern literature’s most famous fading belle. Like Amanda,

Southern U.S. Drama Blanche desperately clings to the markers of aristocratic standing, and her downfall is both tragic and fascinating. Blanche arrives at the New Orleans apartment of her sister, Stella, after a series of scandals have forced her to leave Belle Reve, the family plantation. Disdainful of Stella’s brutish husband, Stanley Kowalski, and critical of the dilapidated condition of the couple’s neighborhood, the ironically named Elysian Fields, Blanche tries to inhabit a world of ‘‘magic’’ rather than to face the realities that surround her. Ultimately, when her past indiscretions are revealed and she is raped by Stanley, she fully retreats into her fantasies and is taken to an insane asylum, left only to rely ‘‘on the kindness of strangers.’’ Blanche’s breakdown, and Stella’s determination to believe Stanley’s denial of her sister’s rape, speak in part to the impossibility of balancing Southern ideals with the modern condition. Williams returns to the theme of the inherent repression of identity in Southern gender roles in many of his later plays, including many of his most famous: Summer and Smoke (1948), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Suddenly Last Summer (1958). It is his use of sex and violence to explore a range of Southern experiences that have made him among the most famous of American playwrights. The modern era of Southern drama is also notable for its inclusion of a number of important black playwrights. While not as widely celebrated as Green, Hellman, and Williams, their contribution to Southern letters was undeniable and it gave birth to a new era of African American playwriting in the South. Zora Neale Hurston, the anthropologist and novelist, wrote a number of plays during this period, several of which focus on discriminatory practices within the black community. For example, Color Struck (1925) demonstrates how one character, Emma, loses both her partner and her daughter because of her paranoia that she will not be compared favorably to lighter-skinned women. Hurston’s 1930 play Mule Bone, written with the poet Langston Hughes, is a comedy that depicts black folk life, focusing on the ways in which inhabitants of a small town can argue passionately with one another but still coexist happily. Willis Richardson (1889– 1977) was one of the most prolific black playwrights of the modern era, composing more than thirty plays. His play The Broken Banjo: A Folk Tragedy (1925), is a one-act play that depicts an argument between Matt Tuner and his brother-in law over a banjo. Their disagreement escalates until Matt is taken to jail and family is fractured. The play serves as a commentary on the fragility of the black community. These plays not only provide important insight into black life in the twentieth century South, but they represent the inclusion of African American playwrights into the Southern canon, a genre that was most visibly dominated by white, male playwrights in the colonial and antebellum periods. The contemporary era of Southern theater represents yet another shift in focus. While, like their predecessors, contemporary Southern playwrights often place the region at the center of their imaginative vision, the contemporary South is

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Western Drama through the Ages not as clearly defined as the Old South, certainly, or even the New South. This ‘‘No South,’’ as it has been termed, is the result of regional homogenization, or what has been identified as the ‘‘McDonald-ization’’ of the South. Contemporary Southern playwrights, then, are charged not with either justifying or challenging Southern culture, as were their predecessors, but determining if a distinct Southern culture still exists and locating that culture in the national ethos. One of the most successful recent Southern playwrights is Beth Henley (b. 1952), whose 1981 play Crimes of the Heart won the Pulitzer Prize. The play examines the lives of three sisters, each of whom is unconventional in her own right: Meg refuses to be evacuated in a hurricane, Lenny snaps and attacks a neighbor, and Babe shoots her wayward husband. The sisters are traditional Southern eccentrics, those tolerated despite, or even celebrated because of, their dysfunctionality. Yet Crimes of the Heart is not merely a contemporary local color tale: instead, the play concerns itself with the sisters’ attempts to understand how the past has affected them and to form a genuine community that both acknowledges this past and allows them to move forward. The play ends on an optimistic note, as the women recognize that they share an undeniable and meaningful bond. Like Henley, Horton Foote (b. 1916) is interested in the role that the fading Southern tradition plays in contemporary life. While he is known primarily for The Orphans’ Home Cycle, a series of nine plays written between 1994 and 1997 that follow the development of a single character, one of his best plays is The Trip to Bountiful (1953), a work that offers a meditation on the power of the Southern home. In it, Carrie Watts travels from the city of Houston to her family’s country home, where she finds she is filled with purpose. The Agrarian ideals of the South are blended with a modern world-weariness, and Carrie finds a sense of true belonging among the country people she encounters. Henley and Foote are not alone, and, indeed, the contemporary South has already produced a slew of successful playwrights, including Marsha Norman, Preston Jones, and Romulus Linney. They join a long tradition of Southern dramatists who have sought to explore the complex and shifting environment of the South, seeking to identify the region’s unique qualities while defining it in relation to the American experience.

FURTHER READING Flora, Joseph M. and Lucinda Mackethan, eds. The Companion to Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Hobson, Fred. The Southern Writer and the Postmodern World. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1991. Rubin, Louis D. The Faraway Country: Writers of the Modern South. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1963.


Spanish Drama Jeffrey T. Bersett

EARLY SPAIN As many critics have noted, it is difficult to identify a true ‘‘beginning’’ for Spanish drama, given the extremely complex nature of the development of Spain as a nation and culture. Even in the most superficial of inquiries, one must consider questions of language, ethnicity, religion and politics when attempting to identify theatrical productions that can be considered ‘‘Spanish’’ in some meaningful way. Early Spanish society consisted of various sociopolitical realities that intertwined and evolved in notably convoluted ways until 1492, when something resembling a unified cultural starting point can be identified. Even this date proves somewhat problematic, though. Among other things, it marks the fall of the Islamic kingdom of Granada and thus the final piece of the ‘‘reconquest’’ of Spain by the Christian monarchs, and also the official expulsion of the Jewish faith, which brought with it forced conversions to Catholicism by those who chose to remain in Spain. These steps toward a sort of cultural homogenization led to other problems, such as tensions between those of ‘‘pure blood’’ (who could prove unpolluted Christian family lines) and conversos (members of families converted to Christianity who were not treated as citizens with equal rights). If nothing else, we know that before 1492 (and, indeed, after) Spain offered a complex mixture of societal influences and cultural trends. It is difficult to comprehend the linguistic diversity that existed on the Iberian peninsula, where people used Latin, numerous Romance dialects, Arabic, and Hebrew. The people who spoke these languages represented varied ethnic and cultural heritages that functioned both independently and in tandem—consider, for example, that tensions among Christians, Muslims, and Jews at times reached open warfare,

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Western Drama through the Ages while at others the three groups coexisted and intermingled in a sort of progressive and productive tolerance. Scholars have raised very real questions about what constitutes the earliest Spanish culture, questions which, for the purposes of the present study, we can pose in terms of drama. Is Spanish drama that work which was written somewhere within the confines of the country that we today call Spain? Should we only consider those works that were written in the particular Romance dialect that would come to be called Castilian (the language that most of the rest of the world refers to as Spanish)? Or—an even more difficult proposition—do we attempt to identify some sort of cultural through-line to later works that are universally acknowledged as part of the Spanish dramatic canon? Most critics today proceed under the assumption that the last of these three questions provides the most sensible approach, though they recognize that the complexities of Spanish culture during the Middle Ages, and the lack of surviving textual evidence, do not allow for easy answers.1 It is generally accepted that the earliest Spanish dramas were liturgical in nature. Fernando La´zaro Carreter, for one, is of the opinion that the growth of religious dramatic production may have stemmed from boredom on the part of congregations with routine services and rituals. He also notes how the need to reach the people led to the use of the vernacular rather than Latin (although Latin would remain an important component of liturgical drama into the sixteenth century). The earliest surviving example of religious drama, the Auto de los reyes magos (The Play of the Magi), dates from the twelfth century. This work, and others from the medieval period, indicate that although the most likely celebrations on the religious calendar for theatrical representations were Easter, Christmas, and Epiphany, they were not the only occasions for such activity. Most notably, the feast of the Assumption provided an opportunity for some of the most elaborate early productions—Assumption plays mounted in various regions of Spain (such as Arago´n and Valencia) in the fourteenth century involved elaborate staging and machinery to facilitate the illusion of an ascending Virgin Mary. Secular drama covered a wide range of subject matter and tone. Political satire and propaganda, on one hand, and love and death, on another, were among the many topics featured in pieces that ran the gamut from simple debate to dynamic spectacle. Critics cite a number of important dramas outside the religious vein, among them Francisco de Madrid’s E´gloga (Eclogue, 1495)—a political allegory with propagandistic goals—and Rodrigo de Cota’s Dia´logo entre el Amor y un viejo (Debate Between Love and an Old Man, c. 1511). La´zaro Carreter notes that some authors, such as Go´mez Manrique, wrote works that are difficult to call ‘‘theater,’’ as they rely heavily on their poetry for dramatic effect. Other key figures of the late medieval period include Juan del Encina (1469– c. 1530), Lucas Ferna´ndez (1474–1542) and Gil Vicente (1465–c.1540), all of whom wrote both religious and secular works. We should note also that these

Spanish Drama authors wrote various allegorical plays, which, as Charlotte Stern indicates, would serve as important predecessors to the autos sacramentales (‘‘eucharistic plays’’) of later centuries, an important component in the history of Spanish drama. One other title deserves mention here, although its status as drama remains somewhat controversial (it is written in the basic format of a play, with only character names and dialogue on the printed page, and is considered by many to be a work of narrative prose). The Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea, 1500), known also as Celestina (the name of the title characters’ go-between), by Fernando de Rojas (c.1475–1541), serves as an important bridge between the Middle Ages and what would follow. James Burke calls it ‘‘a very medieval work [that] bears within it indications of radically new ways of conceiving lengthy discourses in prose.’’ A similar assessment can be made of its themes, which include doomed love and corruption—the work thus seems more comprehensively ‘‘modern’’ than other works of its time period. Either way, the Celestina carried Spanish literature into a new era, when many cultural and dramatic trends developed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries would crystallize into a vibrant new artistic tradition.

THE GOLDEN AGE, 1500–1700 The so-called Golden Age of Spanish art and letters is a complex combination of developments spanning roughly the period between 1500 and 1700. Most critics divide this phase of cultural growth at the midpoint of those two centuries, and describe two separate stages with unique philosophical underpinnings, citing the sixteenth century as the Spanish Renaissance, while identifying the main feature of the seventeenth as the development of the Baroque esthetic. These labels, though simplistic, can be applied to drama and the evolution of Spanish theater during the Golden Age, but do not begin to delineate the richness to be found there. Spain as a nation experienced unprecedented growth as a world power during the early part of its Golden Age, as the ruling Habsburgs amassed one of the largest global empires the world has ever known. Success in its colonization and exploitation of the Americas provided Spain with unimaginable wealth that, inevitably perhaps, was squandered as the weakness of the monarchy grew with each successive generation. Corruption took hold, as also seems to happen in such situations, and the Habsburg dynasty was doomed by the time that Carlos II, the last Habsburg king of Spain, took the throne in 1665. The seventeenth century is, in part, remembered as a time of decadence and decay for Spain, a decline that initiated the development of a darker philosophical stance, one of the primary features of the Spanish Baroque period.

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Western Drama through the Ages However, a century and a half before this would occur, Spanish reality (and thus Spanish culture), was in an ascendant phase. In all artistic areas Spaniards were experimenting with new and innovative approaches to the world around them. Duncan Moir indicates that the Renaissance, in terms of drama, began in Spain with Juan del Encina, Lu´ cas Ferna´ ndez, and Gil Vicente. The patterns established by these authors were continued well into the sixteenth century by playwrights such as Bartolome´ de Torres Naharro (c. 1485–c. 1520), who did most of his work while living in Italy, and Diego Sa´ nchez de Badajoz (d. 1550) who, though he is primarily remembered for his religious plays, also wrote allegory and satirical farce. Melveena McKendrick also asserts that it was during the sixteenth century that Spanish drama became theater, and that ‘‘There can be no doubt that until the mid-1550s performed drama in Spain was dominated by the Church and its activities.’’ Several developments during the second half of the sixteenth century guided the further evolution of Spanish theater. Perhaps the most important of these was the decision on the part of Felipe II to name Madrid as the Spanish capital in 1561, one effect of which was, as Margaret Greer comments, that ‘‘this new court city became the principal hub of theatrical activity.’’ The first two major theaters were established some two decades later—the Corral de la Cruz and the Corral del Prı´ncipe were outdoor theaters, as was the practice elsewhere in Spain and Europe, and provided an affordable form of entertainment for a public which quickly came to demand large quantities of dramatic offerings. This led to a massive increase in theatrical production that further refined the Spanish dramatic tradition through a process of experimentation. The result—the three-act Spanish comedia, one of Spain’s most significant contributions to world drama—is a satisfying art-form whose strength, indeed, is to be found in its flexibility, not just for subject matter, but also for verse form: authors could infuse their works with meaning on a rhythmic level, thus allowing for greater impact than had previously been possible. Perhaps the greatest practitioner of the comedia was Lope Fe´lix de Vega Carpio (1562–1635), one of the most prodigious playwrights ever. Some estimates of his literary production put the total number of plays he wrote at 2,500, of which more than 400 have survived to the present day. His dramatic works run the range from comedy to tragedy, from pastoral to epic, from social and political satire to religious sanctity. One of his great works, Fuente Ovejuna (c. 1614), offers a story that highlights concepts of nobility and power, and questions whether honor is the sole domain of those in the ruling classes . El castigo sin venganza (Punishment without Revenge, 1631), considered by many critics to be Lope de Vega’s masterpiece, exposes ‘‘the moral squalor which underlies the fine appearances of a great Court,’’ according to Edward Wilson and Duncan Moir. Victor Dixon

Spanish Drama claims that the play (along with several other works by Lope), ‘‘bear[s] comparison with anything written in Europe during [Lope’s] time.’’ The second great dramatist of the seventeenth century in Spain, if only in chronological terms, was Pedro Caldero´n de la Barca (1600–81). Caldero´n, in a clearer fashion than does Lope, represents the baroque sense of esthetic and philosophy that typified the growing sense of skepticism in the Spanish national psyche. While, like Lope, Caldero´n wrote a number of plays that fall under the category of comedias de capa y espada (cape and sword comedies—plays of intrigue that focus on themes of love and honor), he is perhaps best remembered for his more profound examinations of the human condition in plays such as La vida es suen˜o (Life Is a Dream, 1635). Although this play does not bear the more obvious darkness of other works by Caldero´n, it does probe our perceptions of reality through the story of a Polish prince, Segismundo, whose worth is tested by his father. One of numerous possible readings of this play is that it demonstrates that our worldly concerns have only an ephemeral importance, and that we must act in an upright fashion no matter how we interpret the reality around us. Caldero´n also composed a number of tragedies that question the potential perils of the Spanish system of honor, plays like El me´dico de su honra (The Surgeon of His Honor, 1635), in which a jealous husband extracts vengeance from his wife both literally and figuratively, bleeding her to death when he suspects her of having betrayed him with another nobleman. McKendrick asserts that ‘‘This tough, uncompromising play commands our admiration but not our affection, for our sense of outrage is never dispelled.’’ We should note as well Caldero´n’s great skill in another dramatic genre, for he also wrote a number of distinguished autos sacramentales. The most famous of these is El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theater of the World, c. 1644), in which, through the use of elaborate allegory, Caldero´ n describes the fleeting nature of our existence. It is with this sort of philosophical focus that Caldero´n’s work most aptly demonstrates the more skeptical nature of his time—the world is no longer a place for the certainties demonstrated in earlier, usually religious, drama. A form of despair (which can be seen to have developed in a parallel fashion to the decline of the once seemingly omnipotent Spanish Empire) has overtaken the civilization of which Caldero´n is a product, and his work frequently reflects these greater concerns on both microcosmic (personal) and macrocosmic (allegorical) levels. Other authors whose work had a significant impact on Spanish drama in the seventeenth century include Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616), Tirso de Molina (c. 1584–1648) and Francisco de Rojas Zorrilla (1607–48), a friend and colleague of Caldero´ n who was, as McKendrick notes, ‘‘seventeenth-century Spanish theatre’s most uncompromising and ablest satirist.’’

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Western Drama through the Ages Cervantes, forever remembered for his Don Quijote (Part I—1605, Part II— 1615), also wrote a number of important dramatic works, the most famous of which is El cerco de Numancia (The Siege of Numancia, c.1585). This tragedy, profoundly patriotic in its retelling of ‘‘Spanish’’ heroism in the face of overwhelming odds (the play recounts the valiant defense of Numancia against the invasion of Scipio in the second century B.C.), has been revived at numerous times during Spain’s history, most notably during the siege of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Tirso de Molina (born Gabriel Te´llez) was a Mercedarian monk whose masterpiece, El burlador de Sevilla o El convidado de piedra (The Trickster of Seville or The Stone Guest, c. 1630) contains the earliest version of the don Juan story. This character has become of world literature’s most archetypical figures, and his exploits have been reworked by some of the most famous artists in history, including Mozart and Byron (not to mention Jose´ Zorrilla, whose work is described later in this chapter). One final note regarding the Golden Age should be made, given that this period witnessed the crystallization of the dramatic tradition of short pieces, called loas and entremeses. Loas were comic preludes that opened a session of theater, while entremeses were performed between the acts of the featured full-length drama. Cervantes wrote a number of memorable entremeses, but was hardly the only author who created such works. These pieces would become a staple of the Spanish theatrical experience, and would remain an important dramatic form well into the twentieth century.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Habsburg control of Spain ended in 1700 with the death of Carlos II, and after a brief period of conflict over who would take over the Spanish throne, the French Bourbon dynasty stepped in as rulers of what remained of the Spanish empire. The century which followed, in terms of culture, began a pattern in which European influences arrived over the Pyrenees and were made particularly Spanish. The first example of this process came during the Enlightenment, when French ideals of reason and progress took root in Spain. The artistic descendents of Lope and Caldero´n still dominated Spanish drama during the first decades of the eighteenth century, but Ignacio de Luza´n’s La poe´tica (Poetics, 1737) called for a return to classical forms. The material in this work which dealt with popular theater in Spain (that is, those works in the tradition of Spain’s Golden Age playwrights) identified it as unacceptable in terms of the desire to revive classical concepts of drama. Luza´n hoped for the restoration of the classical unities (action, time, and place) in dramatic works, so as to bring a more lifelike representation of reality to the stage.

Spanish Drama While many authors did not answer Luza´n’s call, those who did created a new type of drama in Spain that lasted into the nineteenth century. One of the most important playwrights of the eighteenth, Leandro Ferna´ndez de Moratı´n (1760– 1828) wrote two plays of special note in the Spanish neoclassical vein. La comedia nueva o El cafe´ (The New Comedy, or The Coffee House, 1792) satirized the excesses of popular theater, while El sı´ de las nin˜as (The Girls’ Consent, 1801, premiered 1806) demonstrated a progressive stance toward the practice of arranged marriages of convenience, among other things. These plays, the latter of which has been called Moratı´n’s masterpiece, demonstrate the playwright’s full support of Enlightenment ideals, and thus call for the rejection of unhealthy customs and artistic tendencies. Other writers who shared Moratı´n’s philosophical and artistic goals included Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos (1744–1811), Jose´ de Cadalso (1741–82) and Vicente Garcı´a de la Huerta (1734–87). Jovellanos and Cadalso are better remembered as writers of nondramatic works, but Garcı´a de la Huerta’s lasting fame is as author of Raquel (1778), a play many critics recognize as the finest example of neoclassical tragedy. Raquel, in typical Enlightenment fashion, seeks to dissect the problems of the present day (in this case, the dangers of absolutist rule), and does so while staunchly observing the neoclassical unities. One other essential writer from Spain’s eighteenth century bears mention. Ramo´ n de la Cruz (1731–94) specialized in shorter theatrical pieces called sainetes (comedy sketches, usually one-act farces). Joaquı´n A´lvarez Barrientos notes that ‘‘Though [Cruz] began his career writing in the classical style, he slowly shifted his talents to the most widely appreciated genres, notably the sainete.’’ Cruz was not alone in his departure from neoclassical norms—a number of play´ lvarez de Cienfuegos (1764–1809), approached drama wrights, such as Nicasio A with a more gothic esthetic. Popular theater as such would survive the Enlightenment and evolve into something entirely different during the early decades of the nineteenth century.

SPANISH ROMANTIC DRAMA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Spanish drama during the first thirty years of the nineteenth century was a hodgepodge of style and tone, varying from works modeled on Golden Age classics to those descended from Enlightenment ideals.2 One of the most popular genres was the comedia de magia (magical comedy) which featured outrageously complicated plots and staging, and frequently included elaborate machinery to produce required special effects. This sort of spectacle was not new to Spanish theater, but reached a certain peak with works like La pata de cabra (The Goat’s Foot, 1829) by Juan de Grimaldi (1789–1872). David Gies notes that this play ‘‘became the most popular play performed in Spain during the first half of the

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Western Drama through the Ages century.’’ However, we remember Grimaldi more as the impresario who brought numerous improvements to the Spanish theater, and who staged some of the most important works of the romantic period. Romanticism arrived late in Spain relative to the rest of Europe, and when it did it evolved in its own peculiarly Spanish way. The romantic dramas that have had the most lasting impact have a desperate, angry quality, and depict a cruel world in which there are few answers. Given the political and social history of early nineteenth century Spain, these characteristics are not surprising—French invasion and control of Spain at the beginning of the century set in motion a series of events that led to profound difficulties on the part of the Spaniards in establishing and maintaining any sort of governmental stability. This pattern would last into the twentieth century, but many of its most harrowing moments occurred during the years preceding the adoption of romantic tenets as a form of artistic expression. Thus we find that dramas such as La conjuracio´ n de Venecia (The Venice Conspiracy, 1834), by Francisco Martı´nez de la Rosa, and Don A´lvaro o la fuerza del sino (Don Alvaro, or the Force of Fate, 1835), by the duque de Rivas (1791– 1865) are intense, disturbing works that focus on our inability to control the reality around us. In the case of the latter, the title character’s quest for love ends in utter disaster, and the world becomes a place where all hope is futile. The play reaches a climax in which don A´lvaro, having lost or destroyed everything dear to him and his beloved (despite his sincere efforts to do right by everyone around him), throws himself off a mountain after shouting ‘‘¡Infierno, abre tu boca y tra´game!’’ (‘‘Hell, open your mouth and swallow me!’’). The obvious existential despair depicted in this and other romantic works would fade with time. In 1844 Jose´ Zorrilla (1817–93) would write the work which, for many critics, closed the door on this extreme form of Spanish romanticism (even though plays of notably romantic nature would continue to appear for decades). It also became the most popular play in the history of Spanish theater, performed even today in annual celebrations of All Souls’ Day. Don Juan Tenorio is a reworking of the story told in Tirso’s El burlador de Sevilla, only here don Juan finds forgiveness and salvation through his love for don˜a Ine´s, rather than the eternal damnation suffered by Tirso’s protagonist. The fact that Zorrilla’s don Juan achieves what his immediate dramatic predecessors could not is indication ´ lvaro, but what enough that Spanish drama had moved beyond the world of don A remains fascinating about the play is that Zorrilla uses numerous romantic tropes on the way to saving his don Juan—we get a real sense of the despair of our reality, but hope survives in the end. It is little wonder that the play achieved the iconic popularity it did during later decades. A similar circumstance can be found in Baltasar (1858), by Gertrudis Go´mez de Avellaneda (1814–73), one of numerous female dramatists to find success during the nineteenth century in Spain. The play contains romantic trappings

Spanish Drama similar to those found in Don Juan Tenorio, but offers a conclusion in which love and faith bring redemption. However, one must not interpret this seeming pattern as the norm for Spanish drama at mid-century—Spanish society had by this point begun moving in a new direction, and various artists would step forward to represent new concerns.

THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY: HIGH COMEDY, MELODRAMA, AND SHORT THEATER FORMS The growing middle class became, collectively, an increasingly important voice in Spanish culture during the middle portion of the nineteenth century, and those topics of import to the bourgeoisie became topics of import for writers and other artists of the day. In terms of drama, this trend took the form of the alta comedia (high comedy). Gies asserts that ‘‘the alta comedia comprises one of the best series of documents we possess about the Spanish middle class, that is, the upper middle class, since the plays capture not only the anxieties but also the manners, customs, look, frailties, and strengths of this newly privileged segment of society.’’ One obvious theme in plays such as these is financial security, and this is demonstrated in plays such as El tanto por ciento (The Percentage, 1861), by Adelardo Lo´pez de Ayala (1828–79), whose plot deals primarily with an important real estate deal involved in the construction of a canal. The play demonstrates the fact that in Spain at this time dramatic heroes are no longer concerned with achieving eternal salvation (or even the most minimal existential comfort), but rather financial solvency. The alta comedia was one form of theater which laid the groundwork for the development of realist drama. As in the rest of Europe (but again, as with romanticism and other cultural movements, somewhat later than elsewhere), Spain began to see a growing predominance of the realist mode in the last decades of the nineteenth century. A number of authors (some more ‘‘realist’’ than others, to be sure) deserve attention here, especially given the wide variety of offerings available in Spanish theater. The most recognized figure from this period, and arguably the most important literary figure in Spain during the second half of the nineteenth century, is Benito Pe´rez Galdo´s (1843–1920), noted primarily for his prose narrative, and in particular for his stunning novels about contemporary (and historical) Spain. His drama must be acknowledged as well, though, and at its best—as in Electra (1901), considered by many to be Galdo´s’s dramatic masterpiece—Galdo´s’s ability to comment metaphorically on the problems of contemporary society still has resonance today. We can see more overtly socialist leanings in works by authors such as Joaquı´n Dicenta (1863–1917). His Juan Jose´ (1895) captures, with no small amount of anger, the unfair treatment of the working class by their socioeconomic

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Western Drama through the Ages superiors. The play, and others like it, reveal the tensions that had been building in Spanish society for decades, as the workers began to unite as a political force. A much different type of drama can be found in the plays of Jose´ Echegaray (1832–1916), whose work bore little comparison to that of Galdo´s and Dicenta. Considered by most as a neo-romantic practitioner of melodrama, Echegaray’s plays were extremely popular in his day. The most notable of these is El gran galeoto (The Great Galeoto, 1881), which uses the hyper-emotional sensibilities of romanticism in combination with a clever framework that creates various levels of dramatic reality to present a number of societal problems, such as a compulsive penchant for gossip. We should note that, of the great writers of the late nineteenth century in Spain, it was Echegaray, not Galdo´s, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1904)—although most critics today agree that it was Galdo´s whose work was more inventive and representative of his time, the Nobel Committee praised Echegaray for having tapped into the great traditions of Spanish theater. Another important development in the last decades of the nineteenth century was the explosion in popularity of short theater forms. In locations that ranged from the major theaters to local coffee houses, short plays were being performed every day and, in some cases, all day. Some establishments admitted customers on a system of teatro por horas (theater by the hour), and offered a wide variety of comedic sketches, musical revues, and one-act plays. Of this last type of drama, we see a vast number of works being written in the parodic or satiric mode, taking famous theater pieces and mocking them through the filter of the day’s concerns. A frequent target was Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio, which received treatments in seemingly every register possible—as comedia alta, as socialist drama, even as pornography, to name just a few. This trend would continue well into the twentieth century, where we find feminist Tenorios, as well as don Juan playing soccer and fighting bulls. One interpretation of the apparent need to appropriate Zorrilla’s play is that it demonstrates its continuing popularity—as long as it remained in the collective consciousness of Spanish theatergoers, it would be fodder for other playwrights. Don Juan was not the only target, though, and frequently a serious drama would premiere, only to have its parody appear days later on another stage. This sort of irreverent handling of both theatrical tradition and present day trends served as notice that the pace of change, both socially and artistically, was accelerating. It is a noteworthy precursor of the vast amount of artistic experimentation that would occur in the early decades of the twentieth century.

BEYOND REALISM: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The turn of the twentieth century marked a time of profound crisis for Spain. The disastrous Spanish-American War of 1898 had left the country stripped of

Spanish Drama what little remained of its once massive empire, and Spaniards searched desperately for a new form of national identity. Discussion ranged from a nationalistic level, recalling the lost great days of bygone eras, to one of sheer existential anxiety. Artistically, this quest was best represented by the so-called Generation of 1898, which consisted of intellectuals and authors like Miguel de Unamuno (1875–1939), Antonio Machado (1875–1939) and Ramo´n Marı´a del Valle-Incla´n (1869–1936), only the last of whom is remembered as a dramatist. Valle-Incla´n’s most important contribution to Spanish drama was the esperpento, a type of work that filters reality as if through a funhouse mirror, distorting our world to reveal its grotesque nature. His theory of the esperpento is found explicitly communicated in a number of places in his writing, including one of his best plays, Luces de bohemia (Lights of Bohemia, 1920). His works display the grotesque through a carnivalesque take on life, in which the author (and thus the audience) view the world in a fashion that highlights both the aforementioned distortion, but also with a sense of distance, in an attempt to observe without being directly involved in the pain to be found there. The use of carnival is frequently explicit, as can be seen in plays such as Martes de carnaval (Mardi Gras, 1930) and Divinas palabras (Divine Words, 1933), in which the horrific passions and greed of a group of rural circus people become representative of the universal struggle to find answers of any kind. The experimentation with dramatic form and content in Spanish theater continued during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and produced a number of (sometimes bizarre) avant-garde productions. One great writer who participated in the search for new modes of expression was Federico Garcı´a Lorca (1898–1936), whose life and literary career are now legendary. A poet and playwright, Lorca held firmly to his rural Andalusian roots while developing sophisticated new poetic sensibilities. Two of his most accomplished works are Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding, 1933) and La casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba, 1936, not produced until 1945 in Argentina). The latter play, an exploration of personal repression as represented by a family of women ruled heartlessly by a cruel matriarch, can be seen as symbolic of Lorca’s thoughts on the political possibilities in Spain, thoughts which would prove prophetic—the Spanish Civil War, begun in 1936 after Lorca had already completed Bernarda Alba, would end with the rise to power of Francisco Franco, the fascist dictator who would rule Spain until his death in 1975. Lorca would not live long enough to see even the Civil War, as he was executed in 1936 by the Spanish Civil Guard, the rural police force that, perhaps not ironically in hindsight, had appeared in a number of his poems as the agents of the very oppression against which he struggled. Franco’s rise to power, and the government that he shaped around himself, brought with it the severe limitation of artistic liberty in Spain until the end of the dictatorship. Not surprisingly, dramatists who wrote works of the ‘‘official’’ theater

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Western Drama through the Ages thrived, with the sponsorship of the government, but these pieces remain little more than historic footnotes due to their propagandistic nature, as do many comedies which can only be called light escapist fare. Some writers, however, managed to work within and around the strict censorship that was a hallmark of the Franco dictatorship. One such author, Antonio Buero Vallejo (1916–2000), had at one point even been condemned to death by the new government. He survived this to go on to become one of Spain’s most prolific and creative dramatists of the twentieth century. In works such as Las meninas (1960), El concierto de San Ovidio (The Concert at Saint Ovide, 1962) and El tragaluz (The Basement Window, 1967), Buero created strategies through which he could symbolically criticize the realities of life under Franco without attracting the attention of the censors. For example, he sets El concierto de San Ovidio in eighteenth century France, and tells the story of a blind orchestra organized by a ruthless impresario. The parallels to contemporary Spain (in Buero’s opinion a country populated by people who are figuratively blind either out of ignorance or by choice) are obvious, as they are in many of his plays. There were other successful writers of social and political drama during the latter part of the Franco dictatorship, such as Lauro Olmo (1923–94) and Alfonso Sastre (b. 1926). Sastre, like Buero, has taken a violently conflictive reality and tried to apply to it a humanistic vision that allows us to understand the world in which we live and, especially in the case of Buero, give us some hope of a potentially positive future toward which to strive. With the death of Franco and the end of fascist censorship, Spanish culture experienced a dizzying transition to a new democracy, a transition which for some has not yet ended. The new level of freedom available has been joyously (and excessively, in some cases) embraced, and its effects are staggering. Madrid finds itself no longer the center of the Spanish theatrical universe, as Barcelona and other cities have stepped to the fore as thriving cultural communities. Drama itself has also become de-centered—Sharon Feldman posits that ‘‘Since the transition to democracy, the theatre of Spain has evolved into a cacophonous state of aesthetic heterogeneity, cultural diversity, and linguistic plurality that is truly unprecedented in modern times.’’ In a tentative way, then, we can observe certain similarities between the context in which Spanish drama found its earliest voices and those in which it exists today. Medieval Spain was a multiethnic, multicultural society that lived in conflict within itself, between its constituent parts—in a most basic sense a parallel to today’s more complex world. The conflicts faced today have arisen in a fashion which fails to surprise: after three and a half decades of enforced homogeneity (from political and religious beliefs to the very language used in every aspect of everyday life), Spaniards are now citizens of a freer world in which a multitude of options lies before them. Their culture and, consequently, their drama reflect the complexities of this new context.

Spanish Drama

NOTES 1. The present study is greatly indebted to a number of scholarly works regarding Spanish culture and drama. Those contributions will be noted as appropriate, but to begin we should note the particular usefulness of the recent Cambridge History of Spanish Literature (Gies 2004), an essential resource for anyone needing a thorough introduction to Spanish literature. 2. In fact, the entire nineteenth century in terms of drama is so vastly complex that what follows in the present study cannot possibly capture even a fraction of its richness and variety. An argument can be made for this being the true Golden Age of Spanish theater. See The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Spain (Gies 1994).

FURTHER READING Barrientos, Joaquı´n A´lvarez. ‘‘Neoclassical versus popular theatre.’’ In Gies, 2004. Burke, James. ‘‘Medieval Spanish prose.’’ In Gies, 2004. Dixon, Victor. ‘‘Lope Fe´lix de Vega Carpio.’’ In Gies, 2004. Feldman, Sharon G. ‘‘Post-Franco theatre.’’ In Gies, 2004. Fucilla, Joseph G. Introduction, Raquel. by Vicente Garcı´a de la Huerta. Madrid: Catedra, 1984. Gies, David T. The Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———, ed. The Cambridge History of Spanish Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Greer, Margaret R. ‘‘The development of national theatre.’’ In Gies, 2004. La´zaro Carreter, Fernando, ed. Teatro medieval. 2nd ed. Madrid: Editorial Castalia (Odres Nuevos), 1965. McKendrick, Melveena. Theatre in Spain, 1490–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Menocal, Marı´a Rosa. The Ornament of the World. New York: Little, Brown, 2000. Rivas, Duque de. Don A´lvaro o la fuerza del sino. Edited by Donald L. Shaw. Madrid: Castalia, 1986. Ruiz Ramo´n, Francisco. Historia del teatro espan˜ol, Siglo XX. Madrid: Ca´tedra, 1977. Santia´n˜ez, Nil. ‘‘Great masters of Spanish Modernism.’’ In Gies, 2004. Stern, Charlotte D. ‘‘The medieval theatre: between scriptura and theatrica.’’ In Gies, 2004. Wilson, Edward M. and Duncan Moir. The Golden Age: Drama, 1492–1700. A Literary History of Spain 3. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971.

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WESTERN DRAMA THROUGH THE AGES

WESTERN DRAMA THROUGH THE AGES A Student Reference Guide




VOLUME 2

Edited by Kimball King

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut • London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Western drama through the ages : a student reference guide / edited by Kimball King. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32934-0 (set : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32935-7 (vol. 1 : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-313-32936-4 (vol. 2 : alk. paper) 1. Drama—History and criticism. 2. Theater—History. I. King, Kimball. PN1721.W47 2007 809.2—dc22 2007010683 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright © 2007 by Kimball King All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007010683 ISBN-10: 0–313–32934–6 (set) ISBN-13: 978–0–313–32934–0 (set) 0–313–32935–4 (vol. 1) 978–0–313–32935–7 (vol. 1) 0–313–32936–2 (vol. 2) 978–0–313–32936–4 (vol. 2) First published in 2007 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48–1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


Contents

VOLUME 1 Preface

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Part I: Four Great Eras of Western Drama Classic Greek and Roman Drama Brett M. Rogers English Renaissance Drama William Kerwin French Neoclassical Drama Andrew Ade Modern Drama Kimball King

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Part II: Two Other Major Eras of Western Drama Medieval Drama Edward Donald Kennedy Restoration Drama John M. Ware Part III: National and Regional Theater Modern Canadian Theater Jerry Wasserman Czech Drama Veronika Ambros

3 30 47 71 79 81 95 125 127 142

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Contents German Drama Christoph E. Schweitzer Modern Indian Drama Sitanshi Talati-Parikh Irish Drama Richard Rankin Russell Italian Drama Ennio Italo Rao Latin American Theater George Woodyard Polish Theater Artur Grabowski Russian Drama in the Eighteenth Century Lurana Donnels O’Malley The Russian Drama of Anton Chekhov Ralph Lindheim Modern Scandinavian Drama Katherine Egerton Southern U.S. Drama Catherine Seltzer Spanish Drama Jeffrey T. Bersett VOLUME 2 Part IV: Theater Movements and Issues African American Drama Kay E.B. Ruth Belief in Contemporary Drama Gerald C. Wood Biblical Drama in Britain and North America Martha Greene Eads Gay Drama James Fisher Gender and Theater Gwendolyn N. Hale Musical Theater Gary Konas Outdoor Drama Eszter A. Julian

154 161 177 187 201 209 239 243 257 268 275

289 291 302 314 332 350 357 366

Contents Part V: Dramatic Genres and Styles Dada in Drama Sarah Bay-Cheng Dramatic Comedy Miriam M. Chirico Dramatic Comedy: A History of European and American Plays Reade Dornan Expressionism Robert F. Gross ‘‘In Yer Face’’ Theater: ‘‘Purely through Image’’ and the Collapse of Language Luc Gilleman Kitchen Sink Drama Reade Dornan Language in Play: From ‘‘Well-Made’’ and Absurdist Plays to Talk Drama Luc Gilleman ‘‘Oh, die Angst! die Angst!’’: Romeo and Juliet as Rock Opera William Hutchings The Primal Power in Harold Pinter and Edward Albee: The American Dream Destructed Penelope Prentice Realism Robert F. Gross Realism: A Survey of Modern Plays Bruce Mann Surrealism Robert F. Gross Tragedy Kimball King Part VI: Theatrical Essentials Acting Styles Julie Fishell Costume Design in the United States Bobbi Owen Directors and Directing Styles Kimball King Dramaturgy Karen Blansfield Drama’s Stages: Theaters and Playhouses in Theatrical History Milly S. Barranger

377 379 391 414 425 440

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485 504 507 521 525 527 533 538 541 546

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Contents Theater Voice Coaching Bonnie N. Raphael

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Editor and Contributors

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PART IV

Theater Movements and Issues


African American Drama Kay E.B. Ruth

SETTING THE CONTEXT FOR THE BEGINNING: THE ORAL TRADITION AND PERFORMANCE To understand any kind of writing by an African American, one must also understand the literary tradition from which it comes. The literature by blacks in this country started with the slaves who were hunted and captured or sold, chained and forced on great slave ships to make their way from Africa to America during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. These slaves, who survived the miserable, treacherous, and often fatal journey, the Middle Passage, passed on to their descendants the oral tradition. This tradition consists of the use of song, dance, recitation, storytelling, and poetry as a means of entertainment, teaching, religious ritual, historical recording, and literary creation. Separated from their homelands, the slaves held on to their cultural traditions. And, because slaves by and large were not allowed to learn to read and write, their literature remained largely oral instead of written until the nineteenth century. These beginnings are directly related to the written literature by African Americans who were able to produce even as slaves and those who produced afterwards. The oral tradition birthed the written literature of black Americans, and the literary lineage from this tradition can be traced to each genre of African American writing. For example, escaped slaves who found their freedom in the Northern cities of America continued the tradition of storytelling, sharing their life stories with others interested in freeing slaves. From many of these speeches and public communications on the abolitionists’ stages came the most popular form of writing by African Americans during that time period: slave autobiography. In the same vein, African American drama is a direct descendant of the oral tradition as it is connected with

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Western Drama through the Ages storytelling, singing, and dancing. In Africa, one of the most prestigious positions in a tribe was that of the griot: the person who retained in his memory the history, literature, and religion of the tribe. During important community events, the griot took a place of authority and would often regale his audience with songs, dances, and storytelling to befit the occasion. In America, the slaves built on the oral and performance traditions of the griot. According to literary scholar William B. Branch, their taking on of the griot’s role is the root of African American drama; oral texts created by the slaves were a continuation of ‘‘the ancient oral tradition of the [African] historian-storyteller, or ‘griot’—with his elaborate, poetic ‘praise song’ monodramatizations, augmented by communal song and dance—which has come down through the centuries.’’ The slaves would tell stories to pass time or even to convey coded messages of unhappiness or rebellion. Their audiences, learning by heart the repeated stories that were often accompanied by songs and dancing, would join in so that the performance, as it had been in Africa, was an oral and communal activity. Thus, just as in Europe the oral productions of the troubadours launched literatures in various countries, African oral productions provided the foundation on which African Americans built dramatic performances and creation. Lucy Terry Prince (1730?–1821) is known as the first African American author. She was an African slave who was bought and freed by her husband and who was also a renowned storyteller who entertained the community with her narrative poems and songs. She is a direct link between Africa and the griot and African American dramatic performance. Her ‘‘Bars Fight,’’ a narrative poem about a Native American massacre of colonists in Massachusetts in 1746, survives only in part. Still, it is evidence of an African American writing and using the text for performance. Prince’s piece is important, too, because it shows how Africans transformed their creative productions into American texts. Adapting to their new surroundings—the colonial American landscape—understanding and learning American traditions and cultural values and taking them as their own, these newcomers to the New World merged oral tradition with American literary forms and themes. For example, ‘‘Bars Fight’’ graphically depicts the murders of several women, children, and men by Native Americans who use hatchets to brutally cut down their foes. Even though only a snippet of ‘‘Bars Fight’’ survives, it is important to note the empathy the narrative voice expresses for the colonists. Prince was a slave during the time she wrote the poem; however, she clearly sees herself in the same position as any other colonist who feared attack. Thus, Prince’s narrative truly represents an American perspective and not just an African or African American perspective. African Americans did develop certain themes in their literature that are distinct from the majority American culture. Depicting the reality of black life in America, voicing disgust and anger with political inequities and casting hope in,

African American Drama despair of, or apathy for the American Dream, African American writers have tried to capture the truth of being a minority with a slave heritage in a democracy. To express this truth from a black perspective, however, does not exclude them from the larger American literary tradition. As a matter of fact, while black dramatists acknowledge and incorporate these uniquely African American themes, they are voicing their perspectives on the same truths being pronounced by other writers of the times.

THE WRITTEN TRADITION: AFRICAN AMERICAN DRAMA The Nineteenth Century Of course, when one thinks of drama, one imagines more than one person standing in front of an audience reciting poetry or a story as Prince did. One thinks of a performance acted out on a stage separating the actors from the audience. One thinks of the lighting, scenery, characters in costumes and the breaking of action into acts and scenes, all of which allows one to understand that one is watching a story being performed live for the audience’s illumination and enjoyment. The audience not only hears the story, but it also sees events unfold. The first known African American theater owner, William Brown, after first offering performances more in line with the oral tradition, adopted this traditional Western mode of playwriting for his acting troupe: Between 1816 and 1817, a Mr. Brown. . .opened a tea garden in lower Manhattan and, in doing so, launched a series of firsts in African American theatre. The popularity of the entertainment that Brown provided for his African American customers— songs, poetry, dramatic monologues—led to the formation of the African Grove Company, a performing troupe of Black actors. . . .When Brown converted the upstairs apartments of the African Grove into a theatre seating 300–400 people, he established the first Black theatre in the country.1

As one can see, the actors’ first performance pieces—‘‘songs, poetry, dramatic monologues’’—reflect the influence of the oral tradition on African American drama. However, these performers were also Americans, and they began to perform dramas that were popular within the larger American culture—one stemming from a European written literary tradition. Mr. Brown is also known as the first American playwright of African descent in America. He wrote The Drama of King Shotoway for the African Grove acting company, and the troupe performed it in 1823. Unfortunately, the play was soon afterwards shut down for good, ostensibly because it was a public nuisance. In reality, these African Americans were considered a threat to a local theater run by white Americans. It did not help that King Shotoway portrayed the defense by slave descendants of the island, Saint Vincent, against colonization by the British.

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Western Drama through the Ages In the play, these blacks were noble heroes and their cause was undeniably just— like that of the American colonists fighting against British tyranny during the American Revolution. It made a bold statement contradicting the racist attitude that Africans and their descendants were inferiors who could, as a consequence, be justifiably enslaved. In an America still struggling with the issue of slavery and the question of what to do with blacks, a drama showcasing the brave defiance by slave descendants against a white European power was, to a white audience, controversial at best and perhaps downright offensive and dangerous. The beginning of African American drama was also highlighted by a curious dilemma black writers have universally experienced: they had the strong desire to participate in the majority culture and gain acceptance from both white and black audiences, but at the same time they were voicing their disillusionment with the status quo. To ignore social injustice would almost certainly alienate them from their black audience. However, to show disdain or to condemn America for its unequal treatment of blacks might cost them the approbation of their white audience. What happened to Mr. Brown is a case in point. Because he suggested that colonization should have been stamped out by armed rebellion by blacks, he was silenced; he lost his popularity with his white audience, and, thus, he lost his theater. Nothing more is known of the history of this Mr. Brown. His story ends with the closing of the African Grove. William Wells Brown, who is the most well-known early African American dramatist, took up the mantle of political protest laid down by his predecessor. An escaped slave, Brown turned to writing literature as a means of calling America’s attention to the horrible conditions of slaves in America. He was an abolitionist who had seen firsthand how dehumanizing, brutal, immoral, and degrading slavery could be for slave and slave master alike. As part of his political efforts, he wrote the play The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom (1858), in addition to several short stories and novels. Brown did not produce this play about a slave couple attempting to run away from their slave master in order to gain freedom, but he would often read it to captive audiences who had come to hear speeches against slavery. Again, here one sees the melding of the African oral tradition of performance and the Western dramatic tradition. Instead of producing the play for the stage, Brown presented the play more in the form of a lecture to protest the subjugation of blacks. In doing so, Brown is also part of a larger American tradition of the time in which authors like Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson toured America, giving lectures and dramatic readings of their works. During the nineteenth century, a different kind of dramatic performance was also started by slaves on Southern plantations, albeit inadvertently. This type of performance is covered under the umbrella of minstrelsy. Today, the terms ‘‘minstrel’’ and ‘‘minstrelsy’’ carry negative connotations because of the stereotypes associated with the art form—stereotypes manifested in the use of black face,

African American Drama mispronounced speech, and images of ignorant-lazy-yet-happy slaves. However, it is important to note that minstrelsy started as a sign of the appreciation white entertainers had for the slaves’ unique styles of dancing and singing. Minstrelsy began because often slaves were called to entertain their masters, mistresses, and guests by singing, dancing, or reciting poetry. White performers saw these ‘‘shows’’ and began to imitate the performances: White minstrel shows formally began in 1842 with the antics of Dan Emmett.. . .In the forty years that followed, hundreds of white men donned hog fat and burnt cork to make thousands and thousands of dollars mimicking and distorting black music, black speech, black dance, and black culture, a tradition that was to last until the mid-twentieth century.2

As Hatch suggests, minstrelsy originated as a distortion of the slaves’ art. Sincere performances became pieces at which to laugh; white audiences enjoyed, as high comedy, the antics and ignorance of ‘‘blacks’’ portrayed onstage. However, black performers were able to reappropriate—that is, ‘‘take back and redefine’’—the minstrel form in order to create serious, political art: After the Civil War, several black minstrel troupes appeared, but to succeed they had to imitate their imitators, and they too blackened their faces and drew white and red circles around their mouths and eyes. Pauline Hopkins in 1879 wrote Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad. . .; she employed the current minstrel dialect as well as song and dance to engage her audience in the serious subject of emancipation.

It is ironic that these dramatists and performers felt the need to participate in the parody of black life portrayed by white minstrels. However, by using these accepted structures in order to critique them and prove their artistic failings, the black minstrels were able to create a parody of the parody. Moreover, they were able to present a serious matter, the desire for freedom and equality, for the audience’s consideration.

The Twentieth Century As in any genre of American literature, African American drama saw lulls between its major literary productions. Thus, the next major period of drama for African Americans came in the early twentieth century with the advent of the Harlem Renaissance. The giants who were to dominate this era in poetry and prose also were to dominate the stage. Langston Hughes, the most prolific writer during this period, wrote several timeless plays, such as Mulatto (1935), which ran on Broadway, and Little Ham (1935). Mulatto underscores the racial tension that still existed in America because of the heritage of slavery and the taboo of interracial sexual liaisons. It tells the story of a family of half black, half white children belonging to a rich white man and his black housekeeper mistress.

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Western Drama through the Ages The youngest son both hates and reveres his father. Searching for the father’s acceptance but denying the racism that causes his father never to marry his mother, the mulatto ends by killing his father and being killed by an angry white mob. The play begs the question of how America is to survive if it maintains the separation of the races and the oppression of African Americans. Little Ham, a much more lighthearted play in many ways, is still tragic in a sense. Here, as with all of Hughes’ writings, the audience finds an everyday Joe, Little Ham, a black man searching for economic opportunities in order to survive in America. As with other American dramatists of the early twentieth century, Hughes offers critiques of the American Dream, the promise of opportunity for all Americans. Hughes had many more successes in the theater, often incorporating song and dance into his productions for the stage. Black Nativity (1961), a favorite of audiences and churches at Christmastime, is a retelling of the story of the birth of Christ interspersing biblical narrative and action with spirituals and gospel songs. James Weldon Johnson, a poet and composer best known for writing the song, ‘‘Lift Every Voice and Sing,’’ also acknowledged the artistry of slaves and the oral tradition. Though technically a collection of poems, his God’s Trombones (1927) is imitative of slave sermons: oral productions meant to be recited dramatically to entertain and instruct the audience. By 1955, when James Baldwin published The Amen Corner, a play that examines the roles religion and politics play in black lives, several famous novelists had turned their narratives into plays. For example, Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940) was produced for the stage. Others rewrote their narratives by adding song and dance numbers as had Hughes. By this time, the written tradition of African Americans in drama had been long established as an entity that provided commentary on the lives of blacks struggling in America under racism as well as a close look at the workings of African American culture. Baldwin’s play, for example, focuses on the inner workings of a close-knit community and the power struggle that ensues when two women in authority disagree. He shows that, within the black community itself, there live oppressive elements associated with human nature, not with racism. He also shows the struggles of one young man to become an adult others can respect. This identity quest is often echoed in both African American and American literature. Perhaps the most renowned African American playwright of the 1950s and 1960s is Lorraine Hansberry, who reached Broadway with the production of A Raisin in the Sun (1959). As with writers before her—American and African American alike, such as Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller and Hughes—Hansberry wrote of the pursuit of and disillusionment with the American Dream. She shows that the American Dream is within blacks’ grasp, though, in order to win it, they must often face and overcome not only institutionalized racism but also internal racist ideas. The story of the Younger family is an important acknowledgement

African American Drama that everyone—man, woman, and child; father, son, mother, and daughter— strives for recognition, love, and happiness. The family realizes that it must unite in order to fulfill each individual’s needs. The play’s title comes from a famous poem ‘‘Harlem’’ by Hughes. The poem begs the question, ‘‘What happens to a dream deferred,’’ or a dream that goes unfulfilled. The play answers by saying that it does not have to ‘‘dry up like a raisin in the sun.’’ Indeed, as black Americans were then discovering en masse during the Civil Rights Movement, happiness could be found by all Americans even in the midst of a racist society; not everyone was racist, and many wanted positive change. The play shows that while fulfillment is affected by the larger society, it can still be found and fought for if one has the support of family. Hansberry died at the very young age of 34 leaving the stage empty of her promise. Still, before she died of cancer, she wrote several more plays including The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window (1964). To Be Young, Gifted and Black (1968) is a compilation of several of her writings her ex-husband put together after her death. With the advent of the Civil Rights Movement came an increase in African American drama. Community centers sprang up to produce politically centered dramatic pieces that also presented the richness of African American life. During this period, writers were encouraged to create literature by, for, and about black life and to reject any major cultural ideology that denied the beauty of blackness. The Black Arts Movement—also referred to as The Black Aesthetic Movement or BAM—was born, and theater was a major part of it. Playwright Adrienne Kennedy can be seen as one of the literary mothers at the forefront of this movement. Technically, Kennedy found her niche as a playwright before the BAM writers began to articulate their philosophy of art as it pertained to American literature, their place in it, and the politics of the larger world. However, her play Funnyhouse of a Negro (1960) does exactly what other poets, essayists, novelists, and playwrights of this movement insist should be done in literature: Kennedy experimented with form and accepted images of blackness while providing a biting commentary on the political institutions that have contributed to the degradation of the African American after slavery. The play’s main character is of mixed race, and she is mentally torn between her European British heritage and her African heritage. She ends by committing suicide, an act that symbolizes how one part of humanity can abuse and brutalize another part just because they are racially different. This act can be seen as negative commentary on the colonization of countries, like Africa, by European nations, which used up the other countries’ resources; as a representation of what racism does to communities; or as a look at the inner chaos one person faces as a result of being victimized by bigotry. Kennedy’s style of presentation was influenced by experimental and expressionist drama. For example, Funnyhouse of a Negro does not present the plot in the usual story pattern of a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, most of the play

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Western Drama through the Ages is in monologue form with much of it repeated over and over. Through this technique, the audience can come to understand the acute mental torment this character is in as well as the fragmented way she sees herself and her heritage. Other Black Arts Movement writers experimented with forms as well as Kennedy, borrowing ideas from the theater of the absurd as well as from ideas of the postmodernists, expressionists, and naturalists. Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones) has emerged as a spokesman for and leader of the Black Arts Movement. He is, as was Langston Hughes, a giant of his time and also of American literature. A prolific writer who has produced essays, poems, literary critiques, and political and social treatises, he is one of the best playwrights of African American drama. His Dutchman (1964) is a play about a young African American student, Clay, who encounters a beautiful white woman on the subway. He is both attracted to Lula, as she seductively eats an apple and strikes up a conversation, and repelled by her racist remarks and because of the cultural mores that tell him he, a black man, cannot trust a white woman. Clay stands as a symbol of the mindset of assimilation castigated by BAM writers. He, clearly, is a student who wants to learn how to be accepted by mainstream America, an act which Baraka considered as Clay’s erasing his heritage. Clay also wants Lula to see him without stereotypes so that he will be acceptable to her. Reflecting Baraka’s political philosophy that such behavior and desires are anti-black, the play ends tragically for Clay; he never makes his destination—Lula kills him— and the woman goes on to captivate another black youth. Baraka argues that assimilation into white society requires a loss of black identity, which consequently implies the destruction of black culture. Baraka was not only producing other plays, such as The Slave (1964) and Great Goodness of Life (1969), but he was also galvanizing efforts to start theaters and schools of drama that would showcase the dramatic efforts of black authors. He started the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School in Harlem in 1965, and, in doing so, institutionalized his philosophy of writing: that black writers should write to black audiences in order to get them to reject mainstream America and its traditions; that African and African American cultural traditions were to be promoted; that art should be influenced by those cultural traditions in a rejection of American and Euro-American influence; and that the anger felt by black Americans, victims of history and racism, should be expressed loudly and passionately. His call for more black drama troupes and playwrights inspired African Americans all across America to step forward and to teach, act, and write. Douglas Turner Ward’s Day of Absence (1965) is one answer to Baraka’s challenge; it is a humorous drama with a political message about the power of the black working class. Set in a small Southern town, the play highlights the chaos that ensues when the white citizenry of the town realize they cannot function without their black domestics and blue collar workers, who have disappeared

African American Drama without a trace. The irony of the play is that the characters are caricatures of white Southerners played by blacks in white face. As such, this play is a parody of the minstrel tradition and the white performers who reinforced stereotypes of blacks, as well as a protest against how lower-class African Americans were often taken advantage of financially—even though they were the labor force that kept America going. Ward’s play is a great example of the playwright’s focus during the BAM. He, along with other playwrights such as Baraka, Alice Childress, Ed Bullins, Ntozake Shange´, and Kennedy, wrote about their world in a way to reappropriate African American images and to reject stereotypes of blacks perpetuated throughout American literary tradition. Alice Childress’s Wine in the Wilderness (1969) is her most famous play although she was writing successful plays much earlier. An actress, she had joined the American Negro Theater (ANT) along with such famous actors as Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee some twenty-six years before. As with her earlier plays for ANT, Wine in the Wilderness focuses on working class characters and how they are affected by a racist, capitalist society. Ever the realist, Childress uses the play to critique inner-racial bigotry as she reveals the hypocrisy many blacks saw in other blacks during the political upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s. Going a Buffalo (1968) by Ed Bullins is another BAM drama that focuses on the lower classes of blacks. With its urban setting, the play dramatizes the desire for blacks caught up in a world of crime and poverty to find the wide open spaces of the American Dream. The play’s characters—Mamma Too Tight, Curt, Pandora, and Art—inhabit a violent world that inhibits them and makes them long for a freer life. They are victims of their environment, a theme closely associated with the earlier naturalist American writers, including Richard Wright. Ntozake Shange´’s choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/ when the rainbow is enuf (1971) is a melding of oral tradition, dance, and drama, as well as the black aesthetic espoused by Black Arts Movement writers. The drama, expressed through poetic monologues, music and dance, is the height of experimentation. The fusing of all of these types of expression is Shange´’s nod to the BAM dictum of rejecting traditional dramatic forms; however, it is also a feminist text which takes on the politics of inner-racism and mistreatment based on gender. for colored girls exposes the violence and sexual exploitation black women face at the hands of black men. At the same time, it is a celebration of the African American woman who can endure this mistreatment and serve as the nurturing spirit of the race. Movements in literature exist when a set of writers sees the world differently and expresses its views differently than the authors who wrote in earlier generations. Such is the case with neo-realist writers—writers who reject the extremism they see in the passion and politics of the Black Arts Movement in order to embrace their appreciation for realism. The Colored Museum (1986) by playwright

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Western Drama through the Ages George Wolfe is a rejection of the feminist perspective of Shange´’s works as well as a rejection of what Wolfe sees as unrealistic representations of black life in other writers. It is a pastiche of characters based on those one would encounter in African American and American literature and history. At the beginning of the play, as the museum opens, the audience is treated to its exhibits: characters who deliver monologues reminiscent of other characters in works by such authors as Hansberry and Shange´, as well as by characters who represent stereotypes in modern America. Wolfe shows that African Americans, especially men, are still being stereotyped as violent and criminal, even by black writers, and that these images are outdated and unrealistic. Therefore, these representations belong in a museum where the audience can see how antiquated and unreal they are. Wolfe also portrays African American women as castrating as they label and mistrust the black men in their lives. As with the other writers before him, Wolfe addresses the theme of African Americans and their historical and economic oppression as well. The most well-known, produced, and studied playwright since Lorraine Hansberry is August Wilson. He stands not only as a great talent in African American literature but as an emerging talent of the American stage. Known for several plays, such as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1982); Fences (1987), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize; Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1988); and The Piano Lesson (1990), for which he won a second Pulitzer, Wilson focuses on realistically portraying African American life in each decade of the twentieth century. For instance, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is about the influence of the blues on mainstream America as well as how the talented musicians who produced this music were exploited because of their color. Though it focuses on what American society does to blacks in terms of oppression, the play also turns its eye on what blacks can and will do to abuse or oppress other blacks. Even though each of Wilson’s plays takes a different focus on black life, those two perspectives are always clearly in focus in order to show that African Americans can be victims, but they can also be victimizers as well. Again, this idea comes from a neo-realistic perspective, which recognizes the mixture of good and bad in everyone. In contrast to Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks generally holds white men responsible for black misfortunes. The American Play (1995), arguably her most famous work, depicts Abraham Lincoln as black man, possibly to suggest that a Caucasian would not benefit her race.

The Twenty-First Century Wilson, Wolfe, Baraka, and others continue to write in the African American tradition, which is based on the slave’s oral tradition, as well as American forms of literature. As they create, they realistically portray the African American experience throughout history. They define what it is to be black in a country that has

African American Drama historically held stereotypical views of blackness; they write about the culture, community, and traditions of blacks so that they are not only recognized as legitimate but also celebrated as culturally important; they show realistically that African Americans can contribute to American society, can attain the American Dream, and have to face the fact that if they do not, it may be their own fault. They write so that audiences may see that African Americans are humans, just like everyone else, with sterling qualities as well as flaws, and that, though their history within the nation may be different, they still retain the American spirit of endurance.

NOTES 1. This account of Mr. Brown is found in the anthology edited by James V. Hatch and Ted Shine, listed first in Further Reading. 2. Both quoted passages on minstrel shows are given by James V. Hatch in his introduction to The Roots of African American Drama, edited by Leo Hamalian.

FURTHER READING Branch, William B. ‘‘Black Dramatists in the Diaspora: The Beginnings.’’ Introduction. In Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora. Edited by William B. Branch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Hatch, James V. and Ted Shine, eds. Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans, The Recent Period 1935–Today. New York: The Free Press, 1996. ———. ‘‘Those Who Left and Those Who Stayed.’’ Introduction. In Black Theatre USA: Plays by African Americans, 1847 to Today. New York: The Free Press, 1996. Hatch, James V. ‘‘Two Hundred Years of Black and White Drama.’’ Introduction. In The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858–1938. Edited by Leo Hamalian. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Marsh-Lockett, Carol. Black Women Playwrights: Visions on the American Stage. New York: Garland Publishing, 1999.

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Belief in Contemporary Drama Gerald C. Wood

A HOMELESS SPIRIT In his study of contemporary theater, Modern American Drama, 1945–2000, C.W.E. Bigsby asserts that many writers at the end of the twentieth century were reconsidering the need for religious perspectives, which Bigsby names ‘‘spirituality.’’ Whether or not that was the case in the 1990s, in the beginning of this century many playwrights have observed the lost sense of the transcendent in contemporary life. While some of these dramatists have left their faith and others maintain a religious practice, they share a concern for the plight of human experience when the spiritual is denied, when life is reduced to the merely physical, wholly material. Their responses to such a predicament are various: sometimes the playwrights reassert belief as a primal source of meaning and order, sometimes they focus on the dehumanization of the isolated self, or sometimes they express the courage found in recovered faith. While the writers considered here—Conor McPherson, Neil LaBute, and Horton Foote—are in no way a definitive list of such playwrights, their recent work indicates some distinctive responses to the loss of religious assurance in the new millennium.

THREE IMPORTANT PLAYWRIGHTS Conor McPherson After many years of alcohol abuse, including one where, in his own words, his behavior had become ‘‘ridiculous,’’ in the spring of 2001 Conor McPherson, the Irish playwright and filmmaker, was rushed to a hospital in London, where he

Belief in Contemporary Drama endured a long coma induced by nearly complete organ shutdown. As he has summarized in an interview with Carol Vander, he was ‘‘in hospital in London for nine weeks. I . . .nearly died. Alcohol . . .almost destroyed my inner organs. I couldn’t walk. I had basically tried to kill myself. Not consciously. But there was a drive deep inside me to finish my existence. It was uncontrollable and I was at its mercy.’’ After such a frightening and temporarily debilitating experience, McPherson wisely took a sabbatical from his personal work in theater. He carved out an interim period of healing in which he would work in film, as writer and director, and adapt the work of others for both stage and screen. He restaged Eugene O’Brien’s Eden, wrote and directed The Actors for Neil Jordan, from a story first imagined by Jordan. His play Shining City followed a three-year absence from the stage, a time of reflection on his own life and mortality. Shining City is set on the north side of the Liffey, in a somewhat seedy, decadent Victorian section of Dublin, where a man in his 50s, John, arrives to see Ian, a therapist in his 40s. Initially John explains that he recently lost his wife, Mari, in an automobile accident, but then, somewhat hesitantly, he adds that he has been seeing her ghost as well. In the second scene, at the same therapist’s office, Ian clumsily tries to break up with Neasa, his working class girlfriend, who is furious over Ian’s abandoning her, and their child, at the home of Ian’s brother and sister-in-law. During their argument it is revealed that he was training for the priesthood when they met and she had a brief affair, before their child was born and after Ian left the church. Scene three returns to another therapy session in which, more comfortable with the therapist, John confesses that childless and fearful of having missed something in his life, he began pursuing another woman, Vivien. But their tryst at Killiney is cut short by their clumsiness and guilt, and so he substitutes a trip to a brothel on the South Circular Road in order to, in his words, ‘‘connect with something, or someone.’’ Following a long wait for his girl, he demands his money back but instead is beaten by a bouncer. Back home, he verbally and physically attacks Mari and withdraws from her. In the present he speculates whether she is appearing in ghostly form to attack or console him. In scene four, Ian returns to his office with Laurence, a male prostitute from a nearby park. After Ian stumbles clumsily over offering drinks, playing music, and being intimate, the two embrace under Laurence’s direction. In the final scene, five, Ian is preparing to move from his office, to Limerick, where he will join Neasa and their child and start a new practice, when John rings up. The ex-patient brings a gift, an antique lamp, and his thanks for Ian’s help, declaring that he is moving into a new house ‘‘on the seafront. . .near St. Anne’s Park.’’ He adds that he is feeling more positive about his troubled relationship with his brother and has happily met another woman. He also saw Vivien once again, but this time he felt ‘‘like nothing had ever happened,’’ that they ‘‘had nothing in common,’’ that the whole experience was ‘‘Mad.’’ The two men agree that, though John felt he saw

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Western Drama through the Ages things, there are ‘‘no ghosts,’’ only feelings and minds which ‘‘just know nothing really.’’ As John leaves, Ian begins tidying the room. As he closes the door through which John has just exited, revealed almost simultaneously to him and the audience is the ghost of Mari as described by John, in a filthy red coat and wet hair, as the lights go down. In his earlier plays McPherson imagines the theater as a playful space to explore appearance and reality, entertainment and earnest inquiry, mischief and reason. In Rum and Vodka, St. Nicholas, and This Lime Tree Bower, for example, the speakers are aware of the audience, make fun of critics, and plead for a sensitive, humane response to their stories. For most of Shining City, this story seems different from the preceding ones, more of a traditional realist play. It follows the experiences of psychologist and patient as they both work through emotional issues. But in the last scene, the facade begins to disappear. First the writer briefly, in his words, ‘‘sticks a finger through the fourth wall’’ by making the audience conscious of itself in the theater.1 John describes his date with a new girlfriend: John:

We’re going to the theatre tomorrow night.

Ian: Oh! John:

I know! (As though the theatre is rubbish.) ‘Good luck’

Then Conor McPherson turns even more deceptive. First he lulls the audience into believing they are following the conventions of mimetic and melodramatic theater toward a sense of closure. Ian reveals his commitment to marriage and heterosexuality. John has exorcised his demons by returning to the house he shared with Mari, followed by purchasing another, a more modern and forwardlooking one on the seashore. But just as the provocations of the playwright’s earlier productions seem tamed, the closing door reveals Mari in her red dress, wet and disheveled, beaten and terrifying. In the hands of a mischievous playwright, realism instantaneously dissolves before Shining City’s spectators. And the audience, even against their better judgment, becomes believers, in ghosts and the magic of theater. No longer able to remain passive theatergoers, they are drawn into the anxious, uncharted physical and emotional space of Conor McPherson’s unconventional drama. This disorientation is not gratuitous theatricality. McPherson integrates such uncertainty into the rhetoric of Shining City. For example, John, a recent beneficiary of psychological healing, testifies to his mentor, Ian, that stability is found in worshipping feeling before all other gods: ‘‘even if I saw [a ghost], Ian, it’s not. . . I mean, seeing something is one thing but. . .it’s how it makes you feel, isn’t it?’’ Embracing one’s affective side isn’t enough. The primordial call to order and comfort offered in religious belief haunts even the therapist.

Belief in Contemporary Drama In the final moments of the play, Conor McPherson is inviting his audience to join his ruminations on the phenomenology of belief. On the one hand, Shining City considers Ian’s confusion, both sexual and emotional, as linked to his liberation from deliberating religious preconceptions. But the psychological explanation, that it is all emotion and point of view, is inadequate as well. If everything is true, then there is no place to stand. As McPherson himself explains in a statement quoted by Ian Johns, ‘‘The play is about life’s uncertainties and the choices that face us . . . .about spiritual people who are faced with the possibility that everything they believe in is nonexistent and how difficult it is to accept the truth that we really don’t know everything.’’ The ghost is revealed in the play because the playwright wants the audience to experience belief as an animal need for a transpersonal grounding of individual experience.2 But equally real is the association of belief with the uncanny, which has unavoidable ties to the disintegrating forces of illusion. If human beings are honest with themselves, McPherson writes, calm and anxiety are the twin children of belief. And so the playwright creates the liminal space of Shining City, where consciousness remains primitive and all ideology is unstable. While the will to believe seems written into the DNA of these characters,3 their desire for knowledge and comfort is grounded in the equally real presence of ‘‘a vast space we know nothing about,’’ as reported in an interview with Carol Vander: To me a play, or any art is just like the paintings on the cave walls that the first human beings did. Those poor fuckers were the first ones to experience being conscious. What a bizarre experience it is to know that we are alive. And wonder if there is a God, and will something save us? To be alive and to understand the existence of pain is pretty frightening. And all I’m doing is drawing myself, or just people, up on the wall of the cave, just to have a look and try to understand the mystery of being here on this big rock in the middle of a vast space we know nothing about.

He hopes this play, like all this plays, inspires the people in the audience to feel closer to the playwright and each other by recognizing themselves in the cave, on the wall, at the theater. Conor McPherson’s plays work simultaneously in two directions. On the one hand, he chooses entertainment over the conventions of traditional theater. The dramas take the viewers on a playful ride to the edge of the permissible in theater. But McPherson is also an inquisitive and highly intelligent writer whose work is a form of conversation with his thoughtful self. As he confessed recently, ‘‘As a person, my inner life has always been turbulent, and I suppose the work I did was always a search for refuge, dry land, something to hold on to which had a kind of validity or self-evident truth to cling to. And that’s a strong drive because it has always been so necessary.’’4 Following such a personal path toward the authentic, he has reminded his audiences and himself that the world is unfixed, unknowable. Given this dark reality, his most contented characters embrace this uncertainty

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Western Drama through the Ages and control themselves in order to increase the chances they will be loved in the face of nothingness. Once they have learned the value of self-control, the characters seek acceptance without becoming the victims of their own desire. They reluctantly discover narcissism in both their early isolation and their subsequent impulses to fuse with the objects of their love. And now, in Shining City, McPherson offers his people, and himself, a form of belief which sanctifies life by wedding loving intention to the uncanny nature of all human experience.

Neil LaBute Neil LaBute and Conor McPherson have much in common as contemporary dramatists. They both claim the early influence of David Mamet, who offered them a pattern of rapid-fire dialogue and intense, emetic self-assertion by anxious and sometimes violent characters, almost always men. They also share experimentation with the monologue form and a satiric view of contemporary life, emphasizing the self-absorption and alienation, the failure to love, of Irish and American males. They both focus on actors as creative collaborators in their writing, and they write and direct for film as well as theater. Less obvious is their shared ambivalence toward their religious experience. McPherson was raised in a Catholic home and educated in Catholic schools. Even though he has left the church, he admits to finding the stories and images of Catholicism arresting and aesthetically pleasing. LaBute became a Mormon after enrolling at Brigham Young University. And yet his plays, especially Bash, freely criticize the excesses of his church. While openly critical of their churches, LaBute and McPherson continue to interpret the material excesses of modern culture against the ethical standards established in Christianity. Behind the disturbing violence of Neil LaBute’s plays and films lies his concern with morality. As the writer himself explained to theater critic John Lahr in 1999, ‘‘The interesting thing about sin is that we’ve gotten a bit away from it. There’s a right and a wrong that goes beyond the daily practice of living, and I think we have gotten away from that idea, yet it sort of hangs over all of us.’’ Significantly, it is the ‘‘idea’’ of right and wrong, not its reality, that interests LaBute. That sense of usable limits is what attracted him to the Mormon faith. He says to Dinitia Smith, ‘‘The great thing about it, you can say definitely, ‘This is what it is.. . .I always liked things that had parameters, demarcation lines. And to see how far I can travel within those lines.’’’ The payoff for him as an artist is, he adds in a comment to Dona Kennedy, an internalized ‘‘moral tone’’ learned by working ‘‘within limits, pushing the boundaries to their very greatest within set limits.’’ In a relativist society, freedom and identity rely, paradoxically, on a clear sense of social order, which allows the individual the choice of obeying the rules or rebelling and accepting the consequences.

Belief in Contemporary Drama This recognition that boundaries are essential to freedom is the central issue in his plays and films. For example, the church hymn that serves as one of the epigraphs to Mercy Seat points to the calm offered by a sense of the transcendent: Approach, my soul, the mercy-seat, Where Jesus answers prayers; There humbly fall before his feet, For none can perish there.

In the presence of a benign authority, the celebrant gains not only humility and liveliness but also the identity implied in the idea of ‘‘soul.’’ According to LaBute, permissiveness makes the pursuit of identity more problematic, not easier. He says that in the film Possession ‘‘What I wanted to get at with Roland and Maud was the idea that the all-permissive society makes a person like a deer in the headlights. The ability to have it all can create this daunting sense that we don’t know what we want.’’ Similarly, his play The Distance From Here is not just about the violence it describes; its theme is ‘‘The more permissive the society, the more people become more confused,’’ according to Daniel Zalewski. As John Lahr wrote in 2001: ‘‘LaBute dramatizes the sin of separation—human beings whose romantic imagination wills them to be strangers to themselves.’’ And strangers to others as well. Although LaBute has been criticized for the behavior of his characters, for the obscenity in his plays and stories, he is actually dramatizing the lack of restraint, of healthy boundaries. Most of the focus is on failed caretaking towards children. Bash involves two instances of infanticide. The Distance from Here ends with two young people deciding whether to recover the body of a baby who has been thrown into a zoo cage. And Ben, in Mercy Seat, while contemplating whether to fake his own death so he can abandon his family for his lover, imagines his twelve-year-old daughter crying over the loss of her father. Though he can imagine his child’s anxiety and fear, he is too focused on himself to sacrifice for her well-being. At the most extreme, LaBute’s short story ‘‘Maraschino,’’ from the collection Seconds of Pleasure, describes a sexual encounter between a young woman and a man who apparently was once her stepfather, a relationship remembered by her but not the man. All of these abuses follow because in these families no one ‘‘acts like an adult or respects a boundary enough to set one,’’ as pointed out in Lahr’s 2002 play review. In the broader, more satiric sense, this betrayal of boundaries becomes a national pathology. At its simplest and most personal, as explained by Mary Dickson, there is a kind of laziness about relationships, which LaBute identifies as part of ‘‘a disposable society. It’s easier to throw things out than to fix them. We even give it a name—we call it recycling. Especially as relationships go, we’re too quick to say the easiest way is to end it because we don’t want to do the work.’’ Stephen Holden adds that in sexual relationships, people treat each other as commodities, craving release from responsibility and choice, a drive which never brings peace:

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Western Drama through the Ages ‘‘The utopian rhetoric of the sexual revolution combined with the commodification of sex to sell everything under the sun have guaranteed that millions of people conditioned to expect erotic salvation on demand are in for a bitter disappointment when it isn’t delivered.’’ This lack of direction, self-control, and loving intention is the basis of the black humor of LaBute’s plays, indicated in the dissonance between traditional ideas of ‘‘the good’’ and the aimless lives of the characters. For example, in Your Friends and Neighbors Cary can only think of being good in terms of sexual prowess; without a sense of morality, he can’t understand the question, and ends by brushing off Barry’s question as to whether Cary thinks he is a good person: Cary:

Hey, I’m eating lunch. . .

In Mercy Seat Abby extends her fantasy of dog-style sex with Ben’s wife into a surreal blend of sadomasochistic sex and religious apocalypse: ‘‘Maybe that’s what Hell is, in the end. All of your wrongful shit played out there in front of you while you’re being pumped from behind by someone you’ve hurt. That you’ve screwed over in life. Or worse, worse still. . .some person who doesn’t really love you anymore. No one to ever look at again, make contact with. Just you being fucked as your life splashes out across this big headboard in the Devil’s bedroom.’’ Both the dark comedy and the morality rely on the dissonance between contemporary physical license and the memory of ethical injunctions from a higher power.

Horton Foote Horton Foote is a substantially different case from Conor McPherson and Neil LaBute, both in his lifelong adherence to Christianity and reliance on a subtext of religious implication. Raised in Wharton, Texas, in a family that valued church affiliation, Foote observed the strength his mother’s family found in the Methodist church. He was especially attracted to the hymns his mother would sing and to the biblical stories he learned at an early age. After his mother moved to the Christian Science Church in the 1930s, her oldest son eventually followed. The emphasis on self-reliance and devout living in Christian Science was also attractive to Foote’s wife Lillian Vallish Foote, who joined her husband in the faith. Such a history supports the writer’s assertion that he is ‘‘a very religious’’ person who contends that all religious belief sustains people of whatever persuasion. But as religious as he is, Foote also warns that his work is not written from that ‘‘point of view.’’ There are, in fact, only a few religious characters in his plays and films. Ludie Brooks, a minister who struggles with grief in an early eponymous teleplay; Carrie Watts, the hymn-singing older woman in The Trip to Bountiful; and Rosa Lee, the Baptist wife in Tender Mercies, form a religious minority in the

Belief in Contemporary Drama Foote canon. Even fewer are the passages in which these characters assert specific religious notions, let alone ideologies. And among that small chorus, many of the loud voices express a fanaticism that is alien to the spirit of Foote’s work. Mrs. Coons, the woman who confronts Horace on the train in Lily Dale, and Mabel and Vonnie, neighbors in The Roads to Home who bring religious instructions but little human help to Annie, often alienate the major characters and, by implication, the audience as well. Evangelism and secretly violent behavior, even when dressed as religious piety, is never normative in Foote’s imaginative world. Foote’s own position is further camouflaged by his employment of found art from his home place, Wharton, Texas. He uses the language, characters, and stories of that particular place, reproducing as truthfully as possible the facts of their history. The people of Wharton are, he asserts, ‘‘the real mythmakers’’ because they are living realities ‘‘rooted in a time and place.’’5 His primary goal is to reproduce their stories without any conscious religious agendas. And yet his plays and films establish remarkably rich subtexts, whose textures rely on ‘‘something’’ asserting ‘‘itself’’ from his ‘‘sense of living.’’ While he does not write from a religious perspective, the tension between his desire to report accurately and his own deeply felt religious convictions creates Foote’s unique form of mythic realism. Take, for example, the issue of disease. There are no Christian Scientists in Foote’s work, faith healing is not a choice for his characters, and the medical profession is treated respectfully. The rhetoric of his religious persuasion is not part of the text of his stories. And yet many of them are about the emotional component in sickness. In The Road to the Graveyard, for example, the fighting in the Darst family is linked to the mother’s systolic abnormalities. As Lyda explains, ‘‘Mama is red in the face and got to choking and I had to nearly put my arm out of joint knocking her on the back. The others were too busy fighting even to notice she was about to fall out. We take her to the doctor to get her high blood pressure down and they come over and fight and raise it up again.’’ In Road to the Graveyard conflicts lead to sinking spells, worry gives rise to rashes, and change stimulates ‘‘sick headaches,’’ which cause upset stomachs. A similar neurasthenia appears late in The Orphans’ Home cycle, only temporarily relieved by unnecessary operations. Although Foote does not explore the issue in any argumentative way, disease is linked with inward or possessive love. Implicitly, he suggests there are better paths to healing. The most obvious alternative is that offered to Mac Sledge by Rosa Lee in Tender Mercies. Following the loving path of her God, Rosa Lee focuses on life, not death, and is thankful for every chance to offer her care. As Mac begins to experience one of his fits of anger and self-doubt after meeting with his ex-wife, Rosa Lee tries to comfort him with her reminder that ‘‘I love you, you know. And every night when I say my prayers and I thank the Lord for his blessings and his tender mercies to me, you and Sonny head the list.’’ Her love, which she sees as a gift from God, is

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Western Drama through the Ages directed at Mac’s alcoholism, portrayed as a sickness of body and spirit. His wife helps Mac set boundaries when she says he can’t drink in her presence and can’t express destructive anger toward her and Sonny. But mostly she feeds him emotionally, offering him graceful living and a home. God’s loving nature expressed through Rosa Lee’s devotion and care inspire healing in Mac and his new family. Such love, Foote writes, inspires an intense desire for personal identity. Foote’s most ambitious portrait of this need is the lives of Horace Robedaux and Elizabeth Vaughn in Foote’s nine-play cycle The Orphans’ Home. Orphaned at an early age by the death of his father and the remarriage of his mother to a man who rejects him, Horace lives an emotionally placeless life. Indicative are his sometimes comic attempts at placing a tombstone on his father’s grave. No one, not even a cemetery caretaker, can tell him which grave is his father’s. After many missteps and confusing attempts at orienting himself within his family and society, Horace finally develops a loving relationship with Elizabeth Vaughn. Their marriage gives him the emotional and spiritual sense of place which heals him. As he declares to Elizabeth in Valentine’s Day, ‘‘I am no orphan, but I think of myself as an orphan, belonging to no one but you .. . .I’ve begun to know happiness for the first time in my life. I adore you. I worship you . . .and I thank you for marrying me.’’ For her part, Elizabeth in Courtship elopes with Horace against the will of her father, the most powerful man in town. She is willing to risk rejection by and alienation from her parents in order to live as she desires. The love between Horace and Elizabeth inspires them to feel and courageously express their own personhood. The final garden scene in Tender Mercies imagines this sense of self as god’s will for mankind. Following the death of Mac’s daughter in an automobile accident, he tends the garden as he confesses to Rosa Lee that he was once in a similar crash but survived. He continues that the previous night he prayed to God for an answer to why he lived and his daughter died. But he got no answer to his prayers, he says. Then, reflecting on his own experience, he adds, You see, I don’t trust happiness. I never did, I never will.

Although Rosa Lee does have a response to Mac revealed earlier in her own prayer—that life is a mysterious course that we need not control—she does not comment on his genuine unhappiness. Instead she embodies the grace-inspired love that encourages Mac’s self-reflection. In the midst of his confusion and despair, Rosa Lee comforts him as he explores his inability to have faith in an order beyond himself. Rather than deny or fuse with his pain, the wife inspires his growing clarity, courage, and responsibility. While foregrounded in earlier works like Tender Mercies and The Orphans’ Home, such images of identity and community are marginal in Foote’s recent work. More typical in these dramas is the life of the spirit offered as an alternative

Belief in Contemporary Drama to a broken physical and material world, as in The Carpetbagger’s Children, which premiered at the Alley Theater in Houston in June of 2001. Written in homage to Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, the play is structured in imitation of Brian Friel’s The Faith Healer.6 It is the story of the Thompson family, told almost exclusively in monologues by three sisters, Cornelia, Grace Anne, and Sissie. Early in the first speech of the play, Cornelia focuses on the life of another sister, Beth, who died in her youth. Their deceased sibling was, according to Cornelia, ‘‘Papa’s favorite. Mama’s too. Mine. Everybody’s.’’ More than that, she was beautiful, stylish, and the natural leader of the family. When she became sick, the local doctors couldn’t diagnose the malady, and so the family took her to specialists in New Orleans. Unfortunately, her disease was diagnosed there as incurable, a reality which the family and town conspired to keep from Beth. And then in a passage reminiscent of Jesus’s return to Jerusalem, Cornelia describes the final days of their sister, being carried off the train, and lifted onto a wagon on a street covered with straw so that the ride would be less jolting, and so that the wagons and horses passing the front of their house would be as quiet as possible: And we all prayed day and night for God to make her well.

Although their prayers are not answered, the people of Harrison create a powerful sense of community in their love of Beth. Though Cornelia’s worshipfulness toward her dead sister colors her impressions, the scene recovers the sense of a sacred place named in the Hebrew word beth. Without any religious declaration, and even with the denial of faith healing in the story, Foote sketches a version of how people would treat each other under a state of grace. The seminal work for this physical hunger for the spiritual is Alone, an original teleplay written for Showtime and aired in December of 1997. It chronicles the life of John Webb, a farmer in his seventies, as he copes with the loss of his wife of 52 years, Bessie. John lives an emotionally rich and courageous life; he knows who he is and what he values. And he is grounded in family life. He enjoys as much as possible his nephews, Carl and Gus Jr., and their wives and children, even though they are obsessively interested in oil leases and the many distractions of popular culture, especially television. John’s two daughters, Grace Anne and Jackie, and their husbands, Gerald Murray and Paul, are more loving. They return to help on the farm, with Paul becoming a caring companion to John, offering solace by recognizing the powerful and enduring love between Bessie and John. But John is not finally sustained by this family any more than by his courageous identity. It is the faith he shares with two aging African Americans, Grey and Sarah Davis, that strikes the resonant final note of the film. Remembering that John always loved devil’s food cake, they visit him to share that delicacy and memories of Bessie. Sarah remembers that the beloved wife always preferred the

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Western Drama through the Ages song ‘‘Shall We Gather at the River,’’ which Sarah then sings, half to herself, in their shared moment of reflection. As the three aging people welcome a profound silence, Grey sanctifies it as a ‘‘Blessed. Blessed. Blessed quiet’’ and John echoes Sarah’s words and sentiment in declaring that they all shall ‘‘gather at the river, The beautiful, the beautiful river.’’ Lonely in their experience of mutability and death, the three believers share their memories in the service of comfort. In the process they gain a degree of transcendence by uniting the living and dead and looking to a river of eternity, which they believe will bring them peace. Though separated by nationality, age, and personal religious views, these three playwrights share a concern for the alienation of contemporary life from the comfort of an ordering sense of the transcendent, the ‘‘Soul’’ asked to clap and sing in Yeats’ ‘‘Sailing to Byzantium.’’ But their responses to this absence are diverse. Conor McPherson in Shining City seeks to liberate belief from the reductive rules and cliche´s of religious, social, and psychological theories. Instead he invites his audience into the liminal space of his dramas, where belief is restored to its primal impulse—to draw one’s vision on the walls of the uncanny. Neil LaBute is more anxious than McPherson over the loss of traditional morality’s call to guilt and responsibility—toward family, community, and history. Without healthy religious controls, the self-absorption and opportunism of latter-day capitalism spins things out of control in his dramas. Like the other two playwrights, Horton Foote admits and reacts to the ‘‘nothing’’ and ‘‘nowhere’’ that surrounds many of his characters. And yet, unlike McPherson and LaBute, Foote finds solace in the order of the universe, a cycle imagined as loving and beneficent, beyond the chaos of individual lives.

NOTES 1. This insight and quote were obtained from Conor McPherson in an interview with the author on October 2, 2004. 2. From the October 2, 2004 interview. 3. From the October 2, 2004 interview. 4. This quote is from Conor McPherson’s correspondence with the author dated June 16, 2003. 5. Taken from ‘‘The Artist as Myth-Maker.’’ Lecture by Horton Foote at the University of Texas at Arlington, November 16, 1988; unpublished manuscript courtesy of Horton Foote. 6. These insights into The Carbetbagger’s Children were conveyed by Horton Foote in a telephone interview with the author on February 11, 2002.

FURTHER READING Bigsby, C.W.E. Modern American Drama, 1945–2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Belief in Contemporary Drama Castleberry, Marion. ‘‘Remembering Wharton, Texas.’’ Horton Foote: A Casebook. Edited by Gerald C. Wood. New York: Garland, 1998. pp. 13–33. Dickson, Mary. ‘‘Who’s Afraid of Neil Labute?’’ Salt Lake City Weekly Septempber 21, 1998: par. 1–35. Foote, Horton. ‘‘Roots in a Parched Ground,’’ ‘‘Convicts,’’ ‘‘Lily Dale,’’ ‘‘Widow Claire’’: The First Four Plays of ‘‘The Orphans’ Home’’ Cycle. New York: Grove, 1988. Holden, Stephen. ‘‘In Summer’s Popcorn Season, Appreciating the Champagne.’’ New York Times September 4, 1998, E1, E10. Johns, Ian. ‘‘Shining in the Dark of Despair.’’ The Times June 7, 2004. Kennedy, Dana. ‘‘A Tranquil Authority on Degrees of Cruelty.’’ New York Times August 16, 1998: AR 9, AR12. LaBute, Neil. The Distance from Here. New York: Overlook, 2003. Lahr, John. ‘‘The Makeover Artist.’’ The New Yorker June 18 & 25, 2001: 170–71. ———. ‘‘Touch of Bad.’’ The New Yorker July 5, 1999: 42–49. ———. ‘‘Whatever: Neil LaBute Turns Psychology into Behavior.’’ The New Yorker May 27, 2002: 120–21. McPherson, Conor. ‘‘Author’s Note.’’ The Weir and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1999. Smith, Dinitia. ‘‘A Filmmakers Faith in God, if Not in Men.’’ New York Times June 23, 1999: E1, E4. Wood, Gerald C. ‘‘Horton Foote: An Interview.’’ Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities 10.3 (Summer 1991): 3–12. ———. ‘‘Old Beginnings and Roads to Home: Horton Foote and Mythic Realism.’’ Christianity and Literature 45 (Spring/Summer 1996): 359–72. ———. Horton Foote and the Theater of Intimacy. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999. ———. ‘‘The Physical Hunger for the Spiritual: Southern Religious Experience in the Plays of Horton Foote.’’ The World Is Our Home. Edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and Nancy Summers Folks. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000. 244–58. ———. Conor McPherson: Imagining Mischief. Dublin: Liffey, 2003. Zalewski, Daniel. ‘‘Can Bookish Be Sexy? Yeah, Says Neil LaBute.’’ New York Times August 18, 2002: 10, 22.

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Biblical Drama in Britain and North America Martha Greene Eads

Christianity is a dramatic faith. Jesus’s directive to his followers to reenact his final meal with them shaped liturgical worship, and theater scholars have long concluded that this celebration of the Last Supper, also called Communion or the Eucharist, was the source from which Western religious drama sprang. Depicting the Christian concepts of Incarnation and Redemption—God’s becoming the man Jesus in order to give His life for humankind—is a monumental challenge creative artists of all kinds, including painters, sculptors, composers, and poets, have relished.

EARLY BIBLICAL DRAMA IN EUROPE The official relationship between Christianity and drama has, however, often been strained. With the rise of Roman Christendom came the decline of theater, a decline St. Augustine noted with approval in 400 A . D . Misgivings about the deceptiveness of acting and disapproval of actors’ lifestyles contributed to the virtual eradication of formal theater in Christian Europe by the sixth century. Ironically, however, the Church itself celebrated Christianity’s dramatic elements in increasingly complex ways, enhancing celebrations of the Eucharist by adding antiphonal exchanges and having priests adopt the roles of characters in accounts of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. Over time, as more scenes were added, liturgical Latin gave way to local languages and the dramatic services’ popularity grew, the action moved from the cathedral choirs to the

Biblical Drama in Britain and North America naves. By the early thirteenth century, many productions had moved outdoors to accommodate crowds. In 1210, Pope Innocent III ordered them out of the church entirely, and soon trade guilds began taking over the plays’ production and moving them to community gathering places, sometimes on large wagons serving as stages. Although they added secular, comical features; local, anachronistic elements; and regional expressions, guild members retained the approval of local Roman Catholic clergy and continued to use the plays to illustrate events from the Bible and instruct audiences in Church doctrine and practice. In their own day, these biblical scenes were often called ‘‘miracles,’’ although most drama historians today reserve that term for discussing plays about saints’ lives and use the term ‘‘mysteries’’ for dramas based directly on the Bible. The term’s significance lies not so much in its relation to the plays’ subject matter as it does their roots in the trade guilds. ‘‘Mystery’’ is derived from the French ‘‘mystere’’ or ‘‘metier,’’ words associated with trade guilds. Alternatively, scholars sometimes refer to ‘‘cycle plays’’ because the guild productions generally featured a cycle of several short plays, rather than just one. Yet another term for these medieval biblical dramas is ’’Corpus Christi plays’’ because many were performed in honor of Corpus Christi, the Latin term for the body of Christ. In a papal bull in 1311, Pope Clement V directed communities to hold processions honoring the Eucharistic elements on the Feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated two months after Easter. In many communities throughout Europe as well as in England, guild members began presenting dramatic tableaux on Corpus Christi Day as displays of religious piety, civic duty, and organizational prosperity. Often, a particular theme or concern unified individual cycles of plays. In The Play Called Corpus Christi (1966), V. A. Kolve shows that the individual plays within a cycle work together to illustrate salvation history. In other words, a cycle is not merely an ‘‘anthology’’ of evolved liturgical plays; it is a set of stories carefully chosen to a specific end. Kolve explains his view of the genre by linking it to the period’s devotional practices: Drama in the later Middle Ages sought to increase the emotional richness and depth of man’s existence as a creature under God. . . .Men were taught that by feeling—by the experience of pity, grief, and love for Mary and Christ in their human roles—they could best come to an understanding of the Godhead, to a true awareness of the price of their salvation, and to an adequate sorrow for their own sin. They were invited above all to contemplate the human tragedy of the Passion, and through that contemplation to share in its transcendental victory.

Kolve attributes to the medieval dramatists the same focus that directs a preacher planning a sermon.

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Western Drama through the Ages One of the plays’ primary functions was almost certainly to promote repentance before communion. Scholar Eleanor Prosser explains the link between the plays and the religious practice: There would seem to be an intimate relation between the cycles and the text for the office for Corpus Christi: ‘‘Repent now. Partake not of Christ’s Body unworthily.’’ Recognizing this relationship is, I believe, essential if we are to approach the plays with an accurate understanding of their purpose. The cycles were not compiled by a loose following of chronology, from Creation to Judgment. Episodes have been carefully selected to fulfill a strictly theological theme: man’s fallen nature and the way of his Salvation.

While she adds that she doubts that a complete repentance cycle ‘‘sprang full-blown from the Festival of Corpus Christi,’’ Prosser nevertheless offers a persuasive and sensitive argument for the medieval biblical drama’s unity and purpose. Although they also provide historians with fascinating clues about economic, social, and theological conditions during the eras in which they were produced, the medieval biblical plays’ primary purposes were devotional. Named for the towns and villages where they are believed to have been first performed, the surviving manuscripts of these plays were written collaboratively and thus have unknown authorship. Some of the most famous medieval English mystery cycles are The Chester Plays, composed as early as 1325 and first published from 1841 to 1847; The Wakefield Plays, composed around 1450 and first published in 1836 as The Towneley Mysteries (named for the family who owned the manuscript); The York Plays, possibly performed as early as 1376 and published in 1885; and The N-Town Cycle, composed around 1468 and published as Ludus Coventriae in 1841. Five of the thirty-two plays in the Wakefield cycle, including the often-anthologized ‘‘Second Shepherds Play,’’ share a common vocabulary, a humorous yet devout perspective, and a distinctive nine-line stanza, leading scholars to conclude that the same ‘‘Wakefield master’’ wrote them. As the gaps between these cycles’ composition and publication dates suggest, biblical drama virtually disappeared from the English stage for several centuries. This disappearance took place for complicated theological and political reasons. Henry VIII began discouraging production of the popular Roman Catholic religious plays with the establishment of the Church of England in the 1530s, and their subsequent status depended on the convictions of his successors. In 1605, King James I proscribed naming God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, or the Trinity onstage, putting the events of Jesus’s life completely off-limits to English dramatists. As a result, for most of the next three centuries, Christian playwrights in England and the countries under its political influence availed themselves of religious themes at will, but they kept a respectful

Biblical Drama in Britain and North America distance from actual biblical stories and characters. The English Lord Chamberlain was given the authority to approve or ban plays based on their content in 1737, and that authority continued until 1968.

BIBLICAL DRAMA’S REVIVAL IN BRITAIN Certainly, English dramatists continued to explore religious themes after the decline of the mystery play, and playwrights in the lands they colonized would eventually follow their lead. Plays ranging from Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth century Doctor Faustus to the many nineteenth century dramatizations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin were rife with religious meaning. Not until the end of the nineteenth century, however, did professional playwrights in both Britain and North America draw dramatic material openly and directly from the Bible. Drama critic Murray Roston speculates that critical biblical scholarship had posed so many challenges to Christianity by this time that dramatizing the Bible ‘‘was less an irreverence than an attempt at its defense.’’

Late Nineteenth Century to Mid-Twentieth Century While he could hardly be described as a defender of traditional Christian faith, Oscar Wilde was the first of several playwrights to bring biblical material back to the English stage at the end of the nineteenth century. His Salome (1893) focuses on the first Christian martyr, John the Baptist, and was banned from London theaters not for its provocative themes but for its violation of the Jacobean proscription against naming Christ on stage. More cautiously than Wilde, Wilson Barrett only edged up to the Bible with his pageant melodramas The Sign of the Cross (1896), The Daughters of Babylon (1897), Quo Vadis? (adapted from Henry Sienkiewicz’ novel in 1900), and The Christian King (1902). The popularity of such religious pageants, as well as that of the American film From the Manger to the Cross (1912) chipped away at opposition to plays about biblical characters, and in 1913 the Lord Chamberlain gave Beerbohm Tree permission to stage Louis N. Parker’s Joseph and His Brethren. Playwrights who followed Parker’s lead and adapted biblical and apocryphal stories included Arnold Bennett (Judith, 1919), E. Temple Thurston (Judas Iscariot, 1923), Clemence Dane (Naboth’s Vineyard, 1925), D. H. Lawrence (David, 1926), James M. Barrie (The Boy David, 1926), and James Bridie (Tobias and the Angel, 1930; Jonah and the Whale, 1932; Susannah and the Elders, 1937; and The Sign of the Prophet Jonah and Jonah 3, both for radio in 1942). Along with these English playwrights, the Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats published The Resurrection, one of his most haunting dramas, in 1931.

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Western Drama through the Ages While these playwrights wrote for the commercial stage, British church dramatists made up a second group of early twentieth century writers to stage biblical stories. Although he was a successful commercial director, William Poel wanted to stage the late medieval morality play Everyman in London’s Westminster Abbey cloister. Having been turned down by the Dean and Chapter, he then approached church officials at Canterbury. Granted permission to stage the play in the Master’s Court of the Charterhouse, Poel presented Everyman and The Sacrifice of Isaac on July 13, 1901. Everyman then went to London’s Imperial Theatre for a month and toured the United States. One of Everyman’s cast members, Nugent Monck, established the English Drama Society four years later, staging The Interlude of Youth and, a year later, nativity plays from the Chester Cycle in Chelsea and Chester. Monck prepared to revive the Ludus Coventriae in 1909, but he was charged with violating the Blasphemy Law and discontinued the English Drama Society. Although his efforts to revive medieval religious drama met with considerable opposition, Nugent Monck won the respect of George Kennedy Alan Bell, who served as Dean of the Canterbury Cathedral in the late 1920s. In 1925, Bell proposed that the Cathedral begin staging a nativity play in the nave each year. Having won the support of his fellow clergy, Bell asked poet John Masefield to write a play for Canterbury and commissioned Gustav Holst to compose the music. Performed on the Cathedral’s nave steps on May 28 and 29, 1928, Masefield’s The Coming of Christ played to more than 6,000 people. With the success of this first play, Bell established the Canterbury Festival of Music and Drama and turned to Nugent Monck for the 1929 play: a revival of Everyman. Unlike Nugent Monck, who was a professional actor and director, John Masefield was more interested in writing poetry and fiction than drama. Today, his plays receive little critical attention. He was, however, most definitely a writer of stature in his own day, being chosen poet laureate in 1930 over Rudyard Kipling, William Butler Yeats, A.E. Housman, and Walter de la Mare. Masefield had certainly been prolific by the time he became poet laureate, having already published thirty volumes of verse and verse drama, ten novels, six prose plays, and fourteen other prose works. Although he was not an orthodox Christian, Masefield was nevertheless drawn to the Bible for dramatic inspiration, having already written the two biblical plays Good Friday (1916) and The Trial of Jesus (1922) for production at a private theater he and his wife had established. (Good Friday eventually opened in London in 1917, and The Trial of Jesus in 1932 after an initial rejection by the Lord Chamberlain.) Both plays focus on the historical figure of Pontius Pilate and his wife Procula, with the addition of Jesus and several other characters in Trial. Masefield’s Canterbury play, The Coming of Christ, focuses on Jesus’ birth rather than on his trial and death. The first half of the one-act play is set in heaven

Biblical Drama in Britain and North America and treats the debate of the pre-incarnate Christ, whom Masefield calls the Anima Christi, with four angels. Warning the Anima Christi against putting on flesh, the angels identify human greed as the cause of destruction and betrayal. The second half of the play focuses on Christ’s coming to earth but nevertheless maintains an otherworldly quality. The magi enter to the accompaniment of a chorus, voicing their hope that the new king for whom they look will satisfy their deepest longings: ‘‘That the fierce be kind,’’ ‘‘That greed be for the things of Heaven / And that the world’s injustice be made even,’’ and ‘‘That man may see God making fair / Each daily thing; God helping man; / And Death a wisdom in the plan.’’ As the magi exit, the three shepherds enter and discuss the injustices they suffer. Eventually, the curtain at the top of the choir steps opens to reveal the Mother and child, to whom the three kings and three shepherds offer gifts. Joined by the choir, they move out into the transept as the Mercy, the Light, the Sword, and the Power speak of God’s leading and urge the audience to worship. While the success of The Coming of Christ enabled George Bell to launch the Canterbury Festival and eventually paved the way for important twentieth century biblical drama festivals in other English towns, including Coventry, Chester, Wakefield, and Tewkesbury, the play did draw criticism. The best-known of the play’s detractors was T.S. Eliot, who challenged Masefield’s theological orthodoxy and asked in The Criterion ‘‘whether such an entertainment serves any cause of religion or art.’’ Eliot was more approving of many of the Festival plays that followed, among them his own Murder in the Cathedral in 1935, poet Charles Williams’s Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury in 1936, and detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Zeal of Thy House in 1937 and The Devil to Pay in 1939. Although their Canterbury plays were not strictly biblical dramas, both Charles Williams and Dorothy L. Sayers did write other scripts based on biblical texts: his Seed of Adam and her nativity play He That Should Come and radio drama cycle The Man Born to Be King. While The Seed of Adam is largely a footnote in drama history, Sayers’s plays had considerable social and theological significance. He That Should Come first was performed as a British Broadcasting Corporation radio play on Christmas Day, 1938, and was soon published with directions for stage production. The play was noteworthy for its rustic setting and casual, sometimes slangy language. Sayers explains her approach in her ‘‘Note to Producers’’: I feel sure that it is in the interests of a true reverence towards the Incarnate Godhead to show that His Manhood was a real manhood, subject to the common realities of daily life; that the men and women surrounding Him were living human beings, not just characters in a story; that, in short, He was born, not into ‘‘the Bible,’’ but into the world.

After hearing He That Should Come, a rural BBC listener observed that ‘‘it’s nice to think that people in the Bible were folks like us.’’

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Western Drama through the Ages Sayers’s use of vernacular speech contributed significantly to the success of He That Should Come, but it created challenges for her as she worked on her next radio project. Pleased with the reception of The Man Born to Be King, the BBC’s Director of Religious Broadcasting asked Sayers in early 1940 to write a series of 30-minute plays for broadcast during the Sunday evening Children’s Hour. Sayers replied that she had long wanted to dramatize Christ’s life but that the proscription against depicting any member of the Trinity on stage had been an obstacle. Perhaps radio would be the medium in which she could pursue this possibility—using ‘‘natural speech.’’ The Director affirmed Sayers’s position and outlined their project for the Censor of Plays at the Lord Chamberlain’s Office, who granted his permission. Although the press cautioned the public against the production with such headlines such ‘‘BBC ‘Life of Christ’ in Slang’’ and ‘‘Gangsterisms in the Bible Play,’’ the biblical radio cycle, which aired between Dec. 21, 1941 and Oct. 18, 1942, proved a remarkable success. Slightly over twelve percent of adult BBC listeners tuned in to the second installment of the children’s series, and the Director estimated that more than two million adults listened over the next year. BBC historian Kenneth M. Wolfe asserted in 1984 that ‘‘ [t]he Sayers cycle rooted the lectionary of the Church of England in storytelling and theatre.. . .It was colloquial and perhaps convincing: above all it was popular, and the common people heard it gladly. That it was the most astonishing and far-reaching innovation in all religious broadcasting so far is beyond dispute.’’ In The Man Born to Be King, her effort to present the biblical account of Jesus’s life to a twentieth-century radio audience, Sayers strove for realism and particularity. Her high regard for the material world as the site of divine activity necessitated an emphasis on Christ’s fully human existence in a particular place and time, signaled by his and the other characters’ use of vernacular speech. In an article published eleven years after The Man Born To Be King, Sayers explained that her artistic precedents, the medieval mysteries, were ‘‘always in contemporary idiom,’’ ‘‘comedy was freely permitted; and there was no aesthetic mystique about simplicity and stylization: the aim was the greatest possible realism and a determination to show the events as living historical fact.’’ In adopting the medieval dramatists’ strategies, Sayers made the events of Jesus’s life seem newly relevant for twentieth century listeners.

BIBLICAL DRAMA IN THE UNITED STATES Plays in the First Half of the Twentieth Century Across the Atlantic, playwrights were attempting to show the relevance of biblical stories in other ways. Ridgely Torrence and Marc Connelly each used Bible-based plays to build bridges between black and white Americans. Torrence’s

Biblical Drama in Britain and North America Simon the Cyrenian (1917) and Connelly’s Green Pastures (1930), gospel dramatizations with all-black casts, challenged audiences to consider whether Christianity really is a faith that transcends race—one in which, as the apostle Paul claims in Galatians 3:28, ‘‘there is neither Jew nor Greek.’’ Their efforts inspired—or provoked—the renowned African American poet Langston Hughes to adopt the genre, as well. Ironically, the two dramatists who so powerfully used biblical material to promote racial equality in the theater and in the Church were neither black nor Christian. Moreover, both Torrence and Connelly have been criticized for misunderstanding and misrepresenting black life in America. Torrence’s Simon the Cyrenian and Connelly’s Green Pastures were, however, groundbreaking plays in their day, extending new theatrical opportunities to African Americans and launching debates about race and faith. John Masefield himself read Torrence’s groundbreaking biblical play shortly after his Good Friday opened in London, writing in a November 2, 1917, letter to Margaret Bridges, ‘‘I’ve also got ‘3 plays for a negro theater’ which may be rather fun.’’ Among Torrence’s Plays For A Negro Theater was Simon the Cyrenian, a one-act about Christ’s crucifixion. Although Masefield does not describe to Bridges the play’s impression on him, Simon the Cyrenian and its companion plays had a profound effect on the American theater. The African American activist and editor W.E.B. Du Bois quoted reviewer Percy MacKaye in the June 1917 issue of The Crisis as having described the trilogy’s New York opening on April 5, 1917, as ‘‘indeed an historic happening. Probably for the first time, in any comparable degree, both races are here brought together upon a plane utterly devoid of all racial antagonisms—a plane of art in which audience and actors are happily peers, mutually cordial to each other’s gifts of appreciation and interpretation.’’ Produced by Emilie Hapgood and directed by the young scene designer Robert Edmond Jones, Simon the Cyrenian opened with its companion one-acts, Granny Maumee and The Rider of Dreams, at the Garden Theatre. Somewhat surprisingly, even the trilogy’s black crucifixion drama initially escaped harsh criticism. Simply staging any professional biblical play was still a risky venture; although the American theater had no Lord Chamberlain to ban potentially blasphemous plays, professional playwrights in the United States were generally as cautious as their English counterparts. Audiences in 1917 could well have been expected to object to productions that did anything more than present cautious re-tellings of the Christian story. At first glance, Ridgely Torrence’s Simon the Cyrenian is a fairly cautious religious play. Like most biblical dramas emerging at the time, Torrence’s play features a set that could have come from a Sunday School text illustration. Its diction is elevated, and it respectfully refrains from having an actor portray Jesus himself. Torrence distinguishes his play from other biblical dramas, however, by writing it

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Western Drama through the Ages for black actors. Although Christian tradition has recognized Simon of Cyrene, Jesus’s cross-bearer, to be African, Torrence’s stage notes indicate that all the play’s characters are black. Writing about Plays For A Negro Theater, African American poet and anthologist James Weldon Johnson marveled ‘‘how Mr. Torrence, a white man, could write plays of Negro life with such intimate knowledge, with such deep insight and sympathy.’’ Although its characters are black, making it an appropriate companion piece to Granny Maumee and The Rider of Dreams, Simon the Cyrenian is the only verse drama among the three one-acts (although with little rhyme and a relatively free meter). Furthermore, its subject matter and dialogue reflect an experience unlike that of the more stereotypical African American characters in Granny Maumee or The Rider of Dreams. Its exotic setting and themes give it a majestic rather than a domestic quality, and it focuses on historical figures instead of on characters inspired by Torrence’s black neighbors in Xenia, Ohio. In the play, Pilate’s wife Procula frets in her garden over her dreams of Jesus of Nazareth. She enlists the aid of the Egyptian queen Acte in sending for the revolutionary Simon of Cyrene, hoping he will start a riot to deliver Jesus from the Romans. Having been moved by a glimpse of Jesus, Simon tells Acte that Jesus—not a black revolutionary—will save Africa. When Acte accuses him of losing his zeal for freeing their continent, Simon explains that Jesus is the representative of universal suffering. Offstage, cries for Jesus’s crucifixion grow louder, and three mockers bearing a scourge, a crown of thorns, and a scarlet robe cross the stage on their way to execute Jesus. Preparing to rush offstage to rescue Jesus from his Roman captors, Simon obeys a mysterious voice that directs him to put away his weapon, warning that ‘‘they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.’’ Simon takes up his sword again when the mockers enter and taunt him for following Jesus, but the voice rebukes him, this time saying, ‘‘Overcome evil with good. Forgive your enemy.’’ Simon then submits to his mockers, who dress him in the robe in which they had earlier dressed Jesus. They pretend to crown him with thorns, calling him ‘‘King of the Africans.’’ As the voice declares, ‘‘If any man will come after me let him take up the cross and follow me,’’ Roman soldiers place Jesus’s cross on Simon’s back. Retrieving the crown of thorns his mockers have tossed aside, Simon places it on his own head and declares, ‘‘I will wear this, I will bear this till he comes into his own.’’ Then the curtain falls. In depicting Simon’s victimization, the play reveals Torrence’s obvious concern about injustices being done to African Americans. The playwright knew that most members of his New York audience would be white, and his play implies that the mistreatment of the African Simon is the equivalent of abusing Christ. In addition to commenting on America’s race problem, however, Torrence also used Simon to promote pacifism to a nation on the brink of World War. Unfortunately, few people had the opportunity to hear his message; the production folded after only

Biblical Drama in Britain and North America ten days at the Garden and another week at the Garrick. Despite the brevity of their run, Three Plays for a Negro Theater made a mighty impression on James Weldon Johnson, who called April 5, 1917 ‘‘the date of the most important single event in the entire history of the Negro in the American theatre’’ and asserted that ‘‘nothing that has been done since has afforded Negro performers such a wide gamut for their powers.’’ Edith J. R. Isaacs wrote in The Negro in the American Theatre that Simon the Cyrenian and its companion plays ‘‘[mark] . . .a turning point in Negro theatre history. They broke completely with all theatre stereotypes of Negro character.. . .They made Negroes welcome in the audience. They showed that Negroes could appreciate a white man’s contribution to the literature of their life, if it were written in truth and beauty.’’ Marc Connelly followed Torrence’s lead with The Green Pastures, a biblical play that depicts events leading to Christ’s crucifixion. Connelly, however, was to take a step further than Torrence in casting a black actor as the Lord God. While neither Connelly nor Torrence chose to show Jesus, having their crucifixion scenes take place offstage, Connelly’s African American Lord God was his play’s central character. Connelly could have chosen a safer course had he stuck more closely to his source, Roark Bradford’s Ol’ Man Adam and His Chillun, a re-telling of biblical stories published in 1928, but one of Connelly’s most significant changes to Bradford’s book was making God the Father black. For Connelly, the adaptation of Christian faith to everyday African American life also yielded a heaven of fried catfish, cigars, and boiled custard, a vision that drama critics have found increasingly problematic. Even at the time of the initial production, the renowned black actor Richard B. Harrison hesitated before accepting the role of the Lord God. A devout Episcopalian, Harrison’s misgivings about the play rose from both his religious convictions and his sense of ethnic loyalty. Not only was he worried that audiences might consider his portraying God blasphemous, but he was also uncomfortable with the play’s depiction of African American folk life. After consulting with a prominent Episcopal clergyman, however, Harrison accepted the lead role. Robert Edmond Jones, who had directed Torrence’s Three Plays for a Negro Theater, was to design sets and costumes; Hall Johnson would lead the music; and Connelly would direct the play himself. After five weeks of rehearsal, The Green Pastures opened on February 26, 1930, in New York’s Mansfield Theater. Concerns about negative public reaction proved unfounded; the show was a hit. The next morning’s reviews were unanimously positive, with The World theater critic Robert Littell’s explaining that his article would appear in the following day’s paper because he had stayed to see the end of the show instead of leaving to submit his review. ‘‘In the meantime,’’ he urged, ‘‘don’t let anything delay you from running to the Mansfield Theater to buy tickets.’’ Officials of the Roman Catholic Cardinal Newman Fund must have heeded his advice: on the morning after the show opened, they bought all the seats for

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Western Drama through the Ages the first benefit performance. Church leaders who might have been expected to balk at the play’s handling of biblical material had instead given it their full support. The play itself is set in an African American church in rural Louisiana, where Mr. Deshee, an elderly preacher, teaches his young pupils Bible stories. When the children ask about God and the Creation, the kindly minister responds in terms they can understand. His lesson gives way to a series of seventeen scenes leading to Christ’s crucifixion. As a whole, the play is both comical and comic— comical in its depiction of human frailty and comic in presenting a struggle that leads to redemption. The play’s comic struggle is not only human, however; Connelly’s Lord God develops compassion through an encounter with an insightful human being. By the play’s conclusion, The Green Pastures’ highly anthropomorphized deity has progressed from being an amiable but somewhat inept and impetuous creator to being a god who suffers alongside his people. In the August 13, 1930, issue of The Christian Century, drama critic Edward Steiner asserts that the Lord God’s tentative quality is the source of The Green Pastures’ appeal. Comparing Connelly’s work to the celebrated Oberammergau Passion Play in Germany, Steiner writes: I am under no illusions. ‘‘The Green Pastures’’ has not softened the hard, grey pavement of Broadway, or perhaps made even a dent, but I felt that I and many in the crowded theater had something of a religious experience—a very simple one. We had a glimpse of a naive, kindly, perplexed God, and he touched our hearts as no God dissected by the philosophers or interpreted by the theologians has.

In ‘‘God on Stage: A Problem in Characterization (Marc Connelly’s Green Pastures),’’ Paul T. Nolan asserts that Connelly’s using The Green Pastures to work out his idea of God distinguishes it from more orthodox biblical drama. He explains: Connelly’s achievement in Green Pastures is a remarkable one, but not. . .because he succeeded with a religious play in a secular age, but rather because he so completely secularized religious concepts that he made his auditors review, and perhaps revise, their social and humanistic beliefs in the light of the implications of their religious principles.

Nolan suggests that the play encourages humans to judge their own behavior rightly rather than reminding us of an inevitable divine judgment, traditional religious drama would have. In Connelly’s Lord God’s transformation, we see a very different repentance from that which Eleanor Prosser believes the medieval mystery plays prompted. Alan S. Downer points out other differences between The Green Pastures and the older biblical plays, asserting similarities that seem to link Connelly’s work to

Biblical Drama in Britain and North America English biblical drama serve a different purpose. He writes, ‘‘The anachronisms in the medieval plays were for the purpose of communication, to make plain the meaning of the stories. The Green Pastures is not concerned with the meaning of the stories it retells as much as with the manner of their retelling.’’ John Mason Brown, however, makes no such distinction, writing, ‘‘When the Custard Maker offers de Lawd a ten-cent seegar, he is following precisely the same impulse which prompted the adoring shepherds in The Pageant of the Shearman and Tailors to present the Christ Child with mittens, a pipe, and a hat.’’ Robert Withington agrees that the similarities are worth noting, asserting that particularities of time and place add realism to both the medieval drama and The Green Pastures. Pointing out that Connelly expressed surprise at the apparent inability of the English Lord Chamberlain who banned the stage version of The Green Pastures to ‘‘distinguish between orthodox sacrilege and a simple miracle play,’’ Withington insists that Connelly knew the earlier tradition. Withington suggests that while he followed the episodic formula of the medieval biblical cycles, Connelly followed a more modern dramatic course in developing his characters. He concludes that the play’s success demonstrates the Bible’s lasting appeal and notes that while ‘‘the play was written with the spirit of the medieval dramatist[,] . . .the spirit of the public has changed, and cannot be restored to that of the Middle Ages.’’ For many, the treatment of race in The Green Pastures was revelatory enough to make it truly good news—a social gospel if not a theological one. Connelly’s play presents in the African American experience a model of spiritual sensitivity and compassion to which every viewer could aspire. W.E.B. Du Bois, whose sociological study of the black Church would likely have equipped him to point out flaws in the play’s handling of either African American life or religious experience, called The Green Pastures ‘‘an extraordinarily appealing and beautiful play based on the folk religion of Negroes.’’ James Weldon Johnson described The Green Pastures as ‘‘something very little short of a miracle.’’ Theater critic Brooks Atkinson praised Connelly for transcending ‘‘Negro comedy’’ to apprehend the timeless and universal, pronouncing the play a ‘‘divine comedy of the modern theater.’’ The Green Pastures’ popular and critical success led to its running for a year and a half in New York’s Mansfield Theatre before touring North America and returning to New York in 1936. The play won Connelly the Pulitzer Prize in 1930 and lead actor Richard B. Harrison the NAACP’s 1931 Spingarn Medal for making the year’s most significant contribution to his race. It was made into a Warner Brothers film in 1936 and revived in New York in 1951; The Hallmark Hall of Fame produced a version for television in 1957. The play’s popularity did, however, wane over time. The Broadway revival in 1951 ran for less than a month, and in 1970, Connelly acknowledged that the play would not withstand another production. ‘‘It could never be revived now, under the present climate,’’ he said. ‘‘God, no. The Negro’s picture of himself right now,

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Western Drama through the Ages in this unconscious snobbism in which he is existing, wouldn’t allow it. He would denigrate the play, would say that this is Uncle Tomism, that this is what we’re trying to get rid of.’’ Increasingly, The Green Pastures has faced charges of Uncle Tomism. The 1936 film has become the subject of considerable study, most of it sharply critical.

Black Dramatists The American theatrical tradition Connelly and Torrence helped establish, however, served as a springboard for the black writers who followed them. As early as 1935, Willis Richardson and May Miller called African Americans to take on the project white playwrights had initiated, writing, ‘‘Why does not the Negro dramatize his own life and bring the world unto him? Paul Green, Eugene O’Neill, and Marc Connelly cannot do it. They see that the thing is possible, and they are trying to do it; but at best they misunderstand the Negro because they cannot think black.’’ Leslie Catherine Sanders explains that the work of such white playwrights ‘‘provided black dramatists with an irritant as well as a model.’’ Chief among the black dramatists who saw black drama by whites as both an irritant and a model was Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes. Some critics believe that Hughes wrote his play Mulatto in response to Ridgely Torrence’s Granny Maumee. Whether or not he was specifically responding to either Torrence or Connelly, Hughes wrote his own African American biblical drama, Black Nativity, in 1961, interweaving his original poetry with traditional Gospel music. Although it offers more music than script, Black Nativity continues to enjoy regular performances during the holidays.

Plays in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century in the United States and United Kingdom Aside from Maxwell Anderson’s The Journey to Jerusalem, an unmemorable blank-verse drama about the young Jesus (1940), and Archibald MacLeish’s far more impressive J.B., a re-telling of the story of Job (1958), commercial biblical plays were still slow in coming to the stage in the mid-twentieth century. Two more significant biblical musicals did, however, appear a decade after Langston Hughes’s: Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell, which opened off-Broadway at the Cherry Lane Theatre on May 17, 1971, before moving to the Promenade on Broadway, and Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar, which opened in New York’s Hellenger Theatre on October 12 of the same year. Although Superstar was the younger of the two productions, Rice and Lloyd Webber had been working on their rock opera for several years, releasing the first song as a single in Great Britain in 1969. They wrote the rest of the show and then completed an

Biblical Drama in Britain and North America entire album recording in July 1970. The American public’s enthusiastic reception for the album gave them the confidence to stage the show in New York the following year. Superstar opened at London’s Palace Theatre in its writers’ native England on August 9, 1972. Both Godspell and Jesus Christ Superstar depict the life of Jesus, emphasizing his humanity and minimizing (if not altogether ignoring) his divinity. Godspell envisions Jesus and his followers as a troupe of clowns in a cityscape and focuses more on his parables from the Gospel of Matthew than on his actual life. One of Jesus’ followers, Judas, does betray him as in biblical accounts, but instead of being crucified, Jesus is killed on a fence. Unlike the Jesus in Matthew, Godspell’s Jesus experiences no resurrection, but his followers conclude the play by singing an increasingly spirited rendition of a reprise of the hit song ‘‘Day By Day’’ that begins with the new lyrics ‘‘Long Live God.’’ In declining to depict the resurrection, and in suggesting that Jesus’s post-crucifixion presence in the world rests in the convictions of his followers, Godspell reflects the Death of God theology William Hamilton and Thomas J.J. Altizer had outlined in their 1966 book Radical Theology and the Death of God. Jesus Christ Superstar also has roots in its contemporary culture; the Who’s treatment of the Messiah myth in the 1969 rock opera Tommy was a likely influence. The central figure in Jesus Christ Superstar really is Jesus, though—an all-too human Jesus misunderstood and betrayed by Judas. Whatever their theological irregularities, both musicals became blockbusters, with Godspell running for 2,651 performances in New York and Jesus Christ Superstar for 720 in New York and 3,358 in London. Both musicals became films in 1973. As if to make up for the centuries religious drama had missed, increasing numbers of playwrights in Britain and North America turned to the Bible for material in 1980s and 1990s. Small-scale, purely devotional drama had never completely died out in individual churches, and that tradition yielded much larger public productions targeting religious audiences across the United States. Individual churches began staging religious plays on ever-grander scales, some of which drew crowds from far beyond their communities. St. Agnes Church in Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey; Hopewell United Methodist Church in Downington, Pennsylvania; First Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia; the Word of Life Bible Institute in Hudson, Florida; and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Santa Rosa, California, were only a few of the religious groups that advertised their elaborate biblical plays on the Worldwide Web as the twenty-first century began. The Mystery Players, a youth drama ministry with chapters in New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York, performed for their home communities across the northeastern United States, drew viewers from Canada, and went on the road. Holy Family Church in Union City, New Jersey, produced the oldest of the American church-sponsored passion plays, billing its Easter drama as ‘‘America’s Oberammergau.’’ Established in 1915 as a ‘‘living prayer’’ for peace during World War I, the Holy Family Passion

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Western Drama through the Ages Play ran weekends in March and April for audiences from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. Even larger-scale, longer-running seasonal biblical plays, many of which developed out of church dramas, still take place annually across the United States. Thirteen of the 114 summer productions tracked by the Institute of Outdoor Drama are religious. The Black Hills Passion Play in Spearfish, South Dakota; The Great Passion Play in Eureka Springs, Arkansas; Jesus of Nazareth in Puyallup, Washington; The Life of Christ Passion Play in Townsend, Tennessee; The Living Word in Cambridge, Ohio; The Louisiana Passion Play in Ruston, LA; Mid-Ohio Valley’s Outdoor Passion Drama in Parkersburg, West Virginia; Worthy Is the Lamb in Swansboro, North Carolina; and Two Thieves and A Savior in Fort Mill, South Carolina, are straightforward depictions of events in the life of Christ. Two Thieves and a Savior runs alternately with The Deliverer, which presents Christ’s life alongside that of Barabbas, and Anno Domini, which dramatizes the story of Stephen, the first Christian martyr. The Man Who Ran (Disney, Oklahoma) presents the Old Testament story of Jonah alongside Christ’s resurrection, and The Promise (Glen Rose, Texas) provides the narrative frame of a grandfather and grandchildren who discuss and sing about biblical days. The Hill Cumorah Pageant (Palmyra, New York) adds stories from the Book of Mormon to its dramatization of biblical events, and The Mormon Miracle Pageant (Manti, Utah) chronicles the early days of the Mormon church. Although they have charted a general decline in the popularity of outdoor dramas in recent years, the Institute reports that the 2000 attendance at the thirteen religious productions was nevertheless an impressive 475,389. English communities staged cycle plays, as well, hoping to increase tourism and cultivate civic pride. Revivals of historic cycle plays in such cities as York began as early as the 1950s and provided new material for academic study. At Wakefield’s Bretton Hall College, Martial Rose experimented with the Towneley Plays in 1958. Translating the manuscript into modern English, he staged twenty of the cycle’s thirty-two plays that year. Nine years later, in 1967, John Hodgson performed the entire cycle at Bretton Hall College on Corpus Christi Day. In the same year, the Centre for Medieval Studies’ Poculi Ludique Societas at the University of Toronto began producing medieval and early modern plays, many of which were in Middle English. Such educational productions, including landmark performances at Leeds and Lancaster in the 1970s, tested staging theories. A new academic field was developing from the work of scholars such as Richard Southern, who published The Medieval Theatre in the Round in 1957; Glynne Wickham, who published Early English Stages in 1959; and Rose, whose Wakefield Cycle translation appeared in 1961. Professional theater people quickly saw promise in the mystery plays as they moved from the cathedral to the academy. Scholarly interest in the medieval

Biblical Drama in Britain and North America biblical drama also inspired professional dramatists who sought innovative creative challenges. Tony Harrison and Bill Bryden’s The Mysteries (1985) and Edward Kemp and Katie Mitchell’s The Mysteries (1997) both re-presented medieval biblical drama for contemporary British audiences, struggling to update ancient material in the interest of their own social, artistic, and religious agendas. Although both Bryden and Mitchell directed their productions on thrust stages, Bryden’s staging at London’s Lyceum invited audience members to move among the performers. In contrast, Mitchell’s staging at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Other Place was more formal. Instead of focusing on physical inclusivity, director Mitchell and dramaturg Edward Kemp used their play to highlight the gospel’s wide social inclusivity. While playwright Harrison had written for and to his native northern England’s working class, Mitchell and Kemp sought to address the concerns of even larger groups of marginalized peoples. The 1997 production cast a black actress as Eve and Mary, suggesting that the biblical message transcends racial barriers. Mitchell and Kemp also attempted to restore Jewish elements removed or twisted in the medieval mystery cycles. Mitchell and Kemp overturn the medieval plays’ treatment of gender by minimizing the follies of Eve and Mrs. Noah and by highlighting admirable minor female characters such as Anne, the mother of Mary, and the prophetess Anna. A female Gabriel impregnated Mary in the 1997 stage version, and characters of the same sex kiss one another.

Challenging Views within Biblical Themes Across the Atlantic a year later, two more playwrights used biblical drama to challenge traditional views of gender and sexuality. Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club on October 13, 1998, and Paul Rudnick’s The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told at the New York Theater Workshop on December 14 of the same year, both packing theaters and provoking picketers. While Most Fabulous re-envisions the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve as being about Adam and Steve, two gay men, and Jane and Mabel, their lesbian counterparts, Corpus Christi goes so far as to depict Jesus and some of his disciples as sexually active gay men. While neither play made full use of its writer’s full abilities, both showed the degree to which late twentieth century dramatists were willing to use biblical material to promote a social and political agenda—and the power biblical material still has to sell tickets. At the cinema, Australian actor and producer Mel Gibson demonstrated the same capacity with his far more orthodox but still controversial film, The Passion of the Christ, which grossed over $125 million during the first five days of its 2004 first run. What accounts for the continuing popularity of biblical drama after so many centuries? Dorothy L. Sayers lauds the

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Western Drama through the Ages Christian story’s dramatic potential in her 1949 essay ‘‘The Greatest Drama Ever Staged’’: So that is the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the under-dog and got beaten, when He submitted to the conditions He had laid down and became a man like the men He had made, and the men He had made broke Him and killed Him. This is the dogma which we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero. If this is dull, then what, in Heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting?

Over half a century after Sayers’s pronouncement, two millennia after the birth of Christ, the Bible’s account of his life, death, and resurrection remain compelling enough to intrigue dramatists and directors yet resilient enough to withstand the theological and artistic gymnastics through which they put it.

FURTHER READING Atkinson, Brooks. ‘‘New Negro Drama of Sublime Beauty.’’ New York Times February 27, 1930: 9,26. Bevington, David. Medieval Drama. Chicago: Houghton-Mifflin, 1975. p. 228 Brown, John Mason. ‘‘The Ever Green Pastures.’’ Dramatis Personae: A Retrospective Show. New York: Viking, 1963. 85–89. Connelly, Marc. Voices Offstage: A Book of Memoirs. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968. Downer, Alan S. Fifty Years of American Drama. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951. Du Bois, W.E.B. ‘‘Dramatis Personae: The Green Pastures.’’ The Crisis 37:5 (May 1930) 162, 177–78. ———. ‘‘The New Negro Theatre.’’ The Crisis 14:6 (June 1917): 80–81. Eliot, T.S. Review of The Coming of Christ. The Criterion 7:4 (June 1928): 5–6. Isaacs, Edith J.R. The Negro in the American Theatre. College Park, Maryland: McGrath, 1968. Johnson, James Weldon. Black Manhattan. New York: Knopf, 1930. Kolve, V. A. The Play Called Corpus Christi. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966. Masefield, John. The Coming of Christ. New York: Macmillan, 1928. ———. Letters to Margaret Bridges (1915–1919). Edited by Donald Stanford. Manchester: Carcant, 1984. ‘‘More History Plays Show Attendance Gains: Total Attendance Declines, But at Slower Rate,’’ U.S. Outdoor Drama (Winter 2000): 1–2. Nolan, Paul T. ‘‘God on Stage: A Problem in Characterization (Marc Connelly’s Green Pastures).’’ Xavier University Studies 4:2 (May 1965): 74-84. Prosser, Eleanor. Drama and Religion in the English Mystery Plays. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961. Richardson, Willis, and May Miller. Negro History in Thirteen Plays. Washington: Associated Publishers, 1935.

Biblical Drama in Britain and North America Roston, Murray. Biblical Drama in England. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Sanders, Leslie Catherine. The Development of Black Theater in America: From Shadows to Selves. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Sayers, Dorothy L. ‘‘The Greatest Drama Ever Staged.’’ Creed or Chaos? New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1949. p. 3–7. ———. He That Should Come. In Two Plays About God and Man. Norton, Connecticut: Vineyard, 1977. pp. 130–86. ———. ‘‘Types of Christian Drama: With Some Notes on Production,’’ Seven 2 (March 1981): 88. Steiner, Edward. ‘‘The Fashion Play of 1930.’’ Christian Century (13 August 1930): 985–6. Torrence, Ridgely. Simon the Cyrenian. In Plays for a Negro Theater. New York: Macmillan, 1917. 78–111. Weales, Gerald. Religion in Modern English Drama. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961. Withington, Robert. ‘‘Notes on the Corpus Christi Plays and ‘The Green Pastures.’’’ The Shakespeare Association Bulletin 9 (Fall 1934): 193–97. Wolfe, Kenneth M. The Churches and the British Broadcasting Corporation, 1922–1956. London: SCM, 1984.

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Gay Drama James Fisher

The term ‘‘gay drama,’’ which most often refers to plays written by and for homosexuals, was coined in the mid-1960s as various marginalized groups— women, African Americans, Latinos, among others—sought liberation from the social constraints which denied them opportunity and equality in American life. Homosexual men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered individuals are traditionally grouped together as ‘‘gay’’ within the realm of drama, but in the past few decades the term has also come to refer to a gay sensibility, meaning simply a collective means of viewing the world through the lens of gay culture. With the onset of the AIDS pandemic in the early 1980s, gay dramas have more overtly explored serious questions inherent in being homosexual in America and, to a significant extent, gay drama has dominated American stages in the last twenty years. Most gay dramas achieving mainstream acclaim have been by and about gay men, with the other sub-groups making strides in off-Broadway and fringe theaters. Alfred Kazin writes, ‘‘‘The love that dare not speak its name’ (in the nineteenth century) cannot, in the twentieth, shut up,’’ but the emergence of a vigorous gay drama demonstrates that there is much to say on a subject about which the stage has been silent for centuries. In reflecting on the history of homosexuals in American theater, Tony Kushner, author of Angels in America, arguably the most acclaimed ‘‘gay drama’’ of the late twentieth century, believes ‘‘there’s a natural proclivity for gay people—who historically have often spent their lives hiding—to feel an affinity for the extended make-believe and donning of roles that is part of theater. It’s reverberant with some of the central facts of our lives.’’ Kushner identifies at least one of the reasons homosexuals find refuge and a necessary means of expression in drama,

Gay Drama although even in theater homosexuals were as consigned to the ‘‘closet’’ as gays in other walks of American life prior to the liberated and liberating 1960s.

EARLY GAY DRAMAS IN THE UNITED STATES Reaching back to the origins of theater and drama, gay playwrights have always been present (if not verifiably identified), but few chose, or were permitted, to present gay themes and characters. In America prior to the mid-twentieth century, openly gay dramatists or explorations of the subject in drama were socially unacceptable, although many gay dramatists were at work on U.S. stages, including leading figures like Clyde Fitch (1865–1909), a close friend and possible lover of Oscar Wilde, and Avery Hopwood (1882–1928), the most popular purveyor of stage farces in the 1910s and 1920s. Actors and designers were similarly compelled to keep their sexual ‘‘deviance’’ from public view and overt depictions of homosexuality in text or imagery were, quite simply, taboo. From the Renaissance to the beginning of the twentieth century, theatrical history provides relatively subtle dramatic examples of homoeroticism and ambivalence toward traditional gender divisions, but little direct discussion of sexual difference can be found. In the eras of classical and Renaissance drama, sexual confusion was expressed in cross-dressing, a practice in which a performer appearing in drag (as a member of the opposite sex) blurs male/female boundaries. This enduring tradition spread across cultures and through the centuries to the present day, but did little to inspire serious dramatic explorations of the obvious, and not so obvious, issues of gender difference. By the late nineteenth century, dramatists occasionally depicted gay characters, although these were typically hidden by descriptions requiring the viewer to recognize a character’s sexual preference without overt identification. Such hidden gay characters were usually peripheral to the main action of the play, sometimes as comic ‘‘sissies’’ or as an obstacle to the main action. Even these characters were few and far between until well into the twentieth century; the taboo of homosexuality in public discourse was so pervasive that any hint of it was too scandalous for theatrical presentations, and in offstage life as well. The late 1890s indecency trials of playwright Oscar Wilde were a tragic scandal that destroyed Wilde’s life, but they served the essential purpose of bringing discussion of homosexuality into the open. Prior to the mid-1920s, however, few dramas in the English-speaking theater dealt with homosexuality in any manner.

GAY DRAMA IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY The first American play to feature homosexuality may be The Drag (1927) by Mae West (1892–1980), but it generated so much controversy that it closed

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Western Drama through the Ages prior to completing a tumultuous pre-Broadway tour. West’s exploitive play, which features an onstage drag ball, set the stage for her next, The Pleasure Man (1928), which also included gay characters. West was a small part of a pervasive post-World War I movement of writers and artists inclined to delve into previously taboo subjects, ranging from sexuality and interracial marriage to politics and women’s rights. In New York, local authorities successfully outlawed any depiction of ‘‘sex degeneracy, or sex perversion’’ on stages from 1927 to 1967, but some plays with gay characters or themes were reluctantly received, including British dramatist Mordaunt Shairp’s The Green Bay Tree (1933). Shairp presents a homosexual character as a sinister figure, unfortunately instigating a trend of depicting gays as villains, pathetic deviants, or effeminate comic stereotypes. In The Children’s Hour (1934) by Lillian Hellman (1906–84), the question of a possible lesbian relationship between two teachers at a private girls’ school inspired its climax, but Hellman stressed that her intention was to explore the corrosive power of a lie, not homosexuality. Secondary gay characters appear in a few American plays of the 1930s and 1940s, but they are rarely identified as such. Simon Stimson, the alcoholic choirmaster of Our Town (1938) by Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), is an example of such types in that he is comparatively unimportant to the play’s main action and that he is depicted as a victim of a society to which he cannot conform. Wilder, a closeted gay man, led a discreet private life and many of his intimates believed homosexuality was a burden to him. In any case, Wilder’s contemporaries would not have accepted any public acknowledgment of his sexual preferences even if he had been inclined to ‘‘come out.’’ Gay characters do not otherwise appear in Wilder’s work, and it can certainly be argued that Stimson’s problems have nothing to do with sexuality since not a single word in the play suggests he is or is not a closeted gay man. Stimson is simply a character who does not fit in Wilder’s conventional turn-ofthe-century small-town setting; he is an outsider who may simply represent all those in marginalized or ostracized groups within American society of the early twentieth century.

Tennessee Williams The dilemma of being a gay dramatist in the middle of the twentieth century is most evident in the life and work of one of America’s finest dramatists, Tennessee Williams (1911–83). Simply put, Williams is the transitional figure of gay drama, moving the stage from avoidance to contemplation of homosexuals and their world, in and out of the closet. In short, Williams liberated sexuality from the invisible list of taboo subjects. His first important play, The Glass Menagerie (1944), includes no references to homosexuality (or sexuality in general) despite Williams’s own sexual preferences and the fact that this ‘‘memory play’’ is at least

Gay Drama partly autobiographical. Williams’s alter-ego, Tom Wingfield, is a sensitive young man forced to work in a factory to support his domineering mother and fragile, repressed sister. Tom struggles to be a writer, a profession often serving as a stage or screen metaphor for homosexuals well into the 1960s. Williams subsequently explored the complex relationship of sex and love in a variety of forms, including a fraught dramatic conversation about homosexuality that seems to mirror American society’s evolving attitudes. Williams’s most characteristic plays feature darkly poetic imagery reflecting the philosophical questions of human existence, particularly in the struggle of romantic, emotionally fragile, or deeply damaged individuals striving to survive brutalizing reality. These characters are expressed through a stage language at once naturalistic and lyrical. In pondering the distance between illusion and reality in the Pirandellian sense, Williams’s characters are caught up in personal struggles placing them in conflict with the accepted norms of their society. Williams’s plays, particularly his earliest, are ambivalent on the question of homosexuality, but over time his gay characters become more visible, opinionated, and certainly more diverse. In an interview, Williams stressed that, ‘‘Sexuality is part of my work, of course, because sexuality is a part of my life and everyone’s life. I see no essential difference between the love of two men for each other and the love of a man for a woman; no essential difference, and that’s why I’ve examined both.’’ Williams’s characters, gay or straight, feel the absence of love and exhibit a profound need for connection, but there is little doubt that, as a rule, Williams was writing about love not gender. Constraints on sexuality in Williams’s time meant that his sexually confused characters—gay, straight, or something in between—are fugitives from mainstream society who can only be fulfilled through transgression against its strictures. These transgressions come, in the final analysis, at great personal cost that typically elevates Williams’s plays to the level of tragedy. Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) was a seismic event in its exploration of sexuality on stage, depicting a central female character who is promiscuous to the point of criminality, but who is also a tragic victim raped by her brutish brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. Blanche DuBois has sought sex as a replacement for love with increasing desperation and from increasingly younger men, a problem resulting from a harrowing death in Blanche’s troubled past—the suicide of her young husband, Allan. Following their marriage, Allan’s repressed homosexuality can only be understood as some unexplained weakness by the immature, sexually naive Blanche. She remembers that There was something different about the boy, a nervousness, a softness and tenderness which wasn’t like a man’s, although he wasn’t the least bit effeminate looking—still—that thing was there.. . .

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Western Drama through the Ages Blanche, unable to comprehend the situation, fell into a deep confusion until she learned the truth ‘‘in the worst of all possible ways’’ by ‘‘coming suddenly into a room that I thought was empty—which wasn’t empty, but had two people in it. . . the boy I had married and an older man who had been his friend for years . . .’’ Shocked and disoriented, Blanche expressed her ‘‘disgust’’ to the humiliated Allan. Cornered, Allan subsequently shot himself in despair and shame, setting Blanche’s descent in motion. The fatal shot replays continually in her disturbed mind and, as a result, Allan’s homosexuality is at the root of her sexual dysfunction. Despite desperate dalliances with countless others, Blanche is unable to escape the guilt she feels and the painful loss of a first love she cannot truly replace. Williams’s next produced play, Summer and Smoke (1948), does not deal directly with homosexuality, but centrally explores the relationship of sex and love. Alma Winemiller fears and rejects sexuality, which she equates with bestiality. Her confusing physical attraction for Dr. John Buchanan, whose view of sex is purely biological, sorely tests Alma’s beliefs. For much of the play, the puritanical Alma retreats behind small-town proprieties and the safety of a weak suitor, Roger Doremus, an unacknowledged gay man who, she instinctively understands, poses no sexual threat to her. Ultimately, Alma’s despair after John changes his views and marries a virtuous young girl instead of turning to Alma, leads her to a complete abandonment of resistance to sexuality, moving, as Williams explained in an interview, ‘‘from puritanical shackles to, well, complete profligacy.’’ In terms of homosexuality, Williams’s controversial Broadway failure, Camino Real (1953), adopts a gay sensibility in its plea for a romanticized attitude toward life. Williams intermingles literary and historical characters in a phantasmagoric world combining Spanish folklore, Christian iconography, and the labyrinths of literary history. One of the characters, Baron de Charlus, borrowed from Proust, is an avowed homosexual and pointedly effeminate, a trait Williams himself claimed to dislike. More overtly masculine characters of ambiguous sexuality appear in Williams’s plays of the mid-1950s and beyond with greater frequency. In Orpheus Descending (1957), Williams’s protagonist, Val Xavier, a modern Orpheus, is a sensual poet inarticulately yearning for transcendence, either through art or sex. A less poetic version of this type is Chance Wayne, the young male hustler of Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), but it is Brick Pollitt, the alcoholic ex-athlete of Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), that Williams’s depiction of homosexuality begins to evolve. Brick hates ‘‘fairies’’ and mocks the memory of the deceased gay couple who formerly owned his family’s Southern plantation. Brick’s athletic prowess is taken as a sign of hyper-masculinity, but Maggie, his sexually frustrated wife, knows otherwise and is distressed by his reckless drinking. It is not the end of Brick’s athletic

Gay Drama career that has brought on his drinking, but fears that his confused feelings for his deceased best friend, Skipper, who was a homosexual, suggest that he might be ‘‘a queer,’’ as he puts it. Williams explained in an interview that Brick ‘‘went no further in physical expression than clasping Skipper’s hand across the space between their twin beds in hotel rooms—and yet his sexual nature was not innately ‘normal’.’’ Brick also feels disgust for the ‘‘mendacity’’ that he finds around him, and finally comes to recognize within himself. Character and author meet in this attitude, for Williams understood as a gay man in 1950s America that mendacity, as Brick explains, is ‘‘a system that we live in.’’ To some extent, Williams tries to have it both ways in Cat, for Brick is ultimately lured back to the marriage bed, leaving the thorny question of his true sexual nature unanswered. Williams’s long one-act drama, Suddenly Last Summer (1958), sketches a bleaker vision of homosexuality. The play begins in the aftermath of the violent and mysterious death of Violet Venable’s poet son, Sebastian. She attempts to convince Dr. Cukrowicz to perform a lobotomy on her niece, Catherine, a witness to Sebastian’s death at the hands of a mob of young men Sebastian sexually exploited. Devoured by his own promiscuous appetites in a frightening cosmos where only the most efficient predators survive, Sebastian is Williams’s darkest image of a homosexual, but beginning with Small Craft Warnings (1972) his viewpoint undergoes a further evolution. Critics generally dismissed this play, but pointed out the embittered view of homosexuality expressed by Quentin, a middle-aged, second-rate screenwriter and avowed homosexual. The play, which is written in a series of connected confessional arias, allows Quentin to reflect on his way of life: ‘‘There’s a coarseness, a deadening coarseness, in the experience of most homosexuals.. . .Their act of love is like the jabbing of a hypodermic needle to which they’re addicted but which is more and more empty of real interest and surprise.’’ Quentin also expresses amazement that Bobby, a young hustler, has ‘‘the capacity for being surprised by what he sees, hears and feels in this kingdom of earth’’ and painfully acknowledges that he himself has ‘‘lost the ability to say: ‘My God!’ instead of just: ‘Oh, well’.’’ Bobby presents an image of youthful wonder and a joy in his unexamined sexuality balancing Quentin’s world-weariness. Critics seemed eager to believe that Quentin’s disillusionment was some sort of final statement on homosexuality by Williams, ignoring the fact that he presents alternative opinions in the play, as in Bobby’s erotic recollection of a bisexual encounter. In two of his final plays, Williams returns to the subject of homosexuality. The Notebook of Trigorin (1981), Williams’s free adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, is largely faithful to its source except in that Williams converts the bored, middle-aged writer Boris Trigorin into a bisexual whose relationship with

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Western Drama through the Ages the imperious actress, Madame Arkadina, is merely a mask for his true desires. Similarly, Trigorin’s relationship with Nina, an aspiring actress, is transformed by Williams into a casual affair intended to alleviate Trigorin’s boredom which, like Quentin’s, has a deadening quality. More significantly, in Something Cloudy, Something Clear (1981), Williams returns to the autobiographical ‘‘memory play’’ approach of The Glass Menagerie, converting his alter-ego from that play, Tom Wingfield, into an aspiring playwright named August who has left home and is living on a shoestring in Cape Cod exploring his homosexual desires and attempting to understand their relationship to his art.

Mid-Century Dramas Williams’s frequent attention to matters of sexuality broke down barriers about the subject, particularly in regard to homosexuality, in American drama, encouraging early 1950s playwrights to follow his lead. Tea and Sympathy (1953) by Robert Anderson (b. 1917) is more notable for its great commercial success than for the play itself, which is little more than a well-crafted drama with ideas of homosexuality firmly rooted in the bourgeois, conformist attitudes of 1950s America. However, its popularity on stage and screen suggest that audiences were at least willing to entertain the subject. In Tea and Sympathy, Tom Lee, a sensitive young man at private school, is brutally treated by his fellow students and a homophobic, hyper-masculine headmaster. Tom is ‘‘saved’’ by the headmaster’s unhappy wife, who takes Tom to bed to prove his heterosexuality. Other playwrights occasionally introduced gay characters and issues, but generally not in their most visible work. William Inge (1913–73), inspired to become a playwright by Williams, avoided openly homosexual characters in his major plays, although his subject matter, as in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957), frequently assails bigotry in any form. Inge features gay characters in his lesser-known one-acts, including The Tiny Closet (1959), in which a man living in a boarding house is victimized by a nosy landlady who breaks into his padlocked closet to discover an array of women’s hats. The landlady’s violation, and the presumption that she will cause him public disgrace, leaves the man’s fate in question. Similarly, in The Boy in the Basement (1962), an undertaker’s assistant secretly attracted to a local youth is forced to receive the boy’s body after an accident. His emotional reaction to the death of the object of his unspoken affection reveals the secret sufferings of closeted gay men in a sympathetic light. Mid-twentieth century American dramatists employed various techniques to present gay characters and themes, but one device, ‘‘transference,’’ the act of disguising homosexual characters and situations behind a mask of heterosexuality, generated controversy. Edward Albee (b. 1928), often accused of transference in the writing of such plays as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? (1962), is a gay

Gay Drama dramatist who emerged in Williams’s wake, but only occasionally featured identified gay characters in his plays until late in his career. Transference inspired New York Times critic Stanley Kauffmann to ‘‘out’’ three unnamed gay playwrights in a 1966 article, ‘‘Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises.’’ Kauffmann did not need to name names, for it is unmistakable that he is pointing to Williams, Inge, and Albee. Implying that homosexual writers have no business to write about anything except acknowledged gay characters, Kauffmann insists that puritanical conventions forced homosexuals to wear masks for generations, to hate themselves, and thus to hate those who make them hate themselves. Now that they have a certain relative freedom, they vent their feelings in camouflaged form. They emphasize manner and style because these elements of art, at which they are often adept, are legal tender in their transactions with the world. These elements are, or can be, esthetically divorced from such other considerations as character and idea. Kauffmann’s article reflects homophobic attitudes of the period and Albee, who dealt directly with homosexuality in Everything in the Garden (1967), and in later plays, has refuted the notion that he, Williams, or other playwrights would consciously indulge in transference. Techniques aside, homosexual characters and themes found voice through the racial divisions of the Civil Rights era in The Toilet (1964) by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones; b. 1934), a savage depiction of the impact of bigotry set in a high school lavatory. Straight dramatists also occasionally explored issues of male sexuality, including Arthur Miller (1915– 2005) in A View From the Bridge (1955), in which a violent male-on-male kiss sets in motion the downfall of homophobic longshoreman Eddie Carbone. In the 1960s, off-Broadway increasingly presented works by openly gay playwrights on gay themes, but the resistance expressed by Kauffmann continued, particularly in the realm of mainstream Broadway drama.

A Turning Point for Gay Drama Two years after Kauffmann’s article, a true breakthrough gay play appeared, generating new controversy. The Boys in the Band (1968) by Mart Crowley (b. 1935) simultaneously won praise for depicting more realistic images of homosexuals and criticism for indulging in outmoded stereotypes. The play’s lasting value may be its warning against a life lived in the closet—or in the attempts of gay men to hide their secret gay lives behind a public facade of ‘‘straight’’ lives— and in comparatively progressive views of the gay lifestyle and the particular dilemmas facing effeminate gays unable to hide their sexual orientation. Critic Clive Barnes, writing at the time of the play’s premiere, found it to be ‘‘by far the frankest treatment of homosexuality I have ever seen on the stage,’’ noting that it ‘‘is not a play about a homosexual, but a play that takes the homosexual milieu,

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Western Drama through the Ages and the homosexual way of life, totally for granted and uses this as a valid basis of human experience.’’ The critical appreciation and commercial success of The Boys in the Band on stage, and in a subsequent film version, provided opportunities for more serious depictions of gay life, but stereotypes continued in such plays as Terrence McNally’s The Ritz (1974), a lunatic farce set in a gay bathhouse that scored an off-Broadway hit (and subsequent film version), as well as a range of mainstream Broadway dramas featuring stereotypical gay characters. A more complex, realistic portrayal of a serious gay relationship is central to the critically-applauded 5th of July (1978) by Lanford Wilson (b. 1937), a drama exploring the disillusionments of the Vietnam generation, and Wilson, a gay writer, often featured homosexuals in the large canon of his plays. Beginning in the early 1960s, off-Broadway proved a generally welcoming venue for openly gay dramatists and plays featuring homosexual characters and themes. Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village is an example of one such a forum and, following the Stonewall riot in 1969, off-Broadway gay dramatists took on a more activist sensibility in responding to homosexual concerns and in deconstructing gender stereotypes. Robert Patrick (b. 1937), one of the playwrights emerging from Caffe Cino, won some critical acclaim in off- and off-off-Broadway theaters before resisting its growing commercialization. However, Patrick’s most acclaimed play, Kennedy’s Children (1974), ironically became his most visible work when it was produced in large commercial theater in England and America. Most of Patrick’s prolific output, including the gay-themed T-shirts (1976), Michaelangelo’s Models (1981), The Trial of Socrates (1986), Untold Decades (1988), Un-tied States (1990), Evan of Earth (1991), and Bread Alone (1993), were presented in smaller venues and chronicled the history and evolution of gay lives more frankly than was possible in most mainstream theaters prior to the 1980s. Changes were in the offing by the mid-1970s, and gay dramatists began to present more diverse portraits of gay characters. Drag actor/playwright Charles Ludlam (1943–87) and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company created outrageous camp spoofs reflecting a more confident gay sensibility. In his adaptation of Dumas’s Camille (1974) and in his own Gothic farce, The Mystery of Irma Vep (1984), among others, Ludlam smashed stereotypes by celebrating them through a kaleidescope of popular culture cliche´s from art, movies, and nineteenth century romantic theater. On the other side of the spectrum, actor/playwright Harvey Fierstein (b. 1954) coupled gay pride with a realistic depiction of the personal life of a drag performer struggling to find love in a still-homophobic society in Torch Song Trilogy (1981). This plea for tolerance surprisingly resonated with Broadway audiences after productions in off-Broadway theaters. Its stage success led to a film version, also scripted by Fierstein. His subsequent book for the hit musical La Cage aux Folles (1984) similarly set contemporary gay characters against the

Gay Drama backdrop of middle America’s traditionally homophobic responses with optimistic visions of a progressive society capable of embracing the gay ‘‘other.’’ A darker view emerges in the grim drama Bent (1978), in which Martin Sherman (b. 1938) examines the tragic fate of homosexuals during the Holocaust, drawing parallels between that era and the homophobia present in contemporary American society.

Larry Kramer and the Appearance of AIDS in Drama Ludlam’s early death from AIDS signaled the next major transition in gay drama: depictions of the personal struggles and divisive social questions arising from the AIDS crisis. In As Is (1985), William Hoffman (b. 1939) immersed his audience in the personal horrors of what became an international pandemic, but no playwright in the 1980s addressed AIDS and its attendant issues as directly as Larry Kramer (b. 1935). His scathing indictment of American society’s failure to respond to the mounting cataclysm was embodied in his vigorous offstage activism and, most particularly, in his documentary-style drama The Normal Heart (1985). Kramer, a screenwriter and novelist, wrote his first off-Broadway play, Sissies’ Scrapbook, in 1973, but he remains an ambivalent playwright, less interested in the medium than the message. The Normal Heart (1985) is set between July 1981 and May 1984 and is intended to document the era in which AIDS was first identified as a ‘‘gay cancer.’’ Indeed, the play’s first line, spoken by a young gay man sitting in a doctor’s waiting room sets the overall tone: ‘‘I know something’s wrong.’’ The Normal Heart probes experiences of several gay men, but the connecting thread in this ambitious, fiery work is Ned Weeks, a thinly-veiled portrait of Kramer himself. In conversations with Dr. Emma Brookner, a committed health-care professional, Weeks learns to his horror that she believes the mysterious illness is transmitted sexually. ‘‘And you want me to tell every gay man in New York to stop having sex?’’ Weeks asks in shock, and Brookner insists that he must do so: the government and medical establishment are in denial, she believes, and gay activism may be the only effective response. Weeks’s temperamental outbursts in dealing with officials and medical authorities, compatriots in his own activist organization, and within his own family serve to isolate him. His lover, Felix, tries to be understanding, but in reflecting on Weeks’s behavior and his own quiet battle with AIDS and the lack of response to the disease, Felix tells Weeks’s brother Ben that ‘‘there’s not a good word to be said for anybody’s behavior in this whole mess.’’ Weeks has an uneasy relationship with his older brother, a father figure who also serves as society’s disapproving voice on the ‘‘gay lifestyle.’’ By the play’s end, Ben moves beyond his prejudices to accept his younger brother, a symbolic image suggesting Kramer’s hopes for American society in general.

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Western Drama through the Ages Following The Normal Heart, Kramer’s next play, Just Say No. A Play about a Farce (1988), was a critical disappointment. Focused on sexual hypocrisy in high places (again during the Reagan presidency), it features an imperious First Lady, her gay son, and the closeted gay Mayor of America’s ‘‘largest northeastern city.’’ The Reagans and New York City mayor Ed Koch are the obvious targets, but Kramer weaves in references to many aspects of contemporary American culture, particularly in regard to homosexuality, AIDS, and politics. Seven years after The Normal Heart, Kramer completed a sequel, The Destiny of Me (1992), which shifts attention to Weeks’s personal history. Focusing on his own family history within the context of late twentieth century American life, and using AIDS as a dramatic catalyst, Kramer creates a wrenching exploration of Weeks’s traumatic sexual awakening and his mounting sense of purpose. Despite its connection to the long tradition of realistic American family dramas, Kramer recounts Weeks’s life through a wide variety of postmodern theatrical devices. Various periods overlap as characters float in and out of the action presenting key situations in Weeks’s life, but again the message matters more than the medium as Kramer demands response to the AIDS crisis and a greater sensitivity to those living with the disease and the lingering homophobic attitudes in the United States.

Critical and Commercial Success: Terrence McNally In the same era, a less confrontational gay dramatist balanced Kramer’s diatribes. Terrence McNally (b. 1939), who had his first major success with the aforementioned 1970s off-Broadway hit The Ritz, had endured failure in the previous decade. McNally’s And Things That Go Bump In the Night (1964) dealt with a crazed mother and her sadistic, bisexual son, but critics were not appreciative of this effort. McNally’s subsequent prolific output ultimately won critical and commercial favor, and his work is burnished by a late twentieth century gay sensibility. McNally’s work increasingly featured openly gay characters and themes after the 1970s. The Lisbon Traviata (1985), for example, focuses on Mendy, a fanatical (and obviously gay) opera fan, who begs his friend Stephen to loan him a rare pirated copy of Maria Callas performing La Traviata in Lisbon. Their encounter over the recording exposes the profound unhappiness of both men, who define themselves exclusively through the larger-than-life but artificial passions of opera. In the late 1980s, McNally adapted Manuel Puig’s novel, Kiss of the Spider Woman, which had previously been an acclaimed film, into a Broadway musical with a score by John Kander and Fred Ebb. After a long gestation period, the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993) received several Tony Awards, including one for McNally’s libretto. McNally focuses Puig’s story through the eyes of one of its central characters, Molina, a gay department store window dresser jailed in a Latin American prison, who escapes his fears through fantasies of his favorite

Gay Drama movie star, known only as The Spider Woman. Valentin, a defiant political prisoner and hyper-masculine male, joins the politically ambivalent Molina in a cell and they achieve a level of mutual respect which helps both face tragic fates. McNally told New York Times critic David Richards that what Kiss of the Spider Woman ‘‘says about a gay man is very important, although he’s not just a gay man. He’s a small person who says, ‘My life is trivial, I’m inconsequential’ and who learns he’s not, that we all matter.’’ McNally’s assimilationist sensibility is reflected in most of his post-1980s plays, including Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), a four-character comedydrama involving Sally, a woman who has recently inherited a Fire Island beach house from her brother, who died of AIDS. Sally and Sam, her husband, invite Sam’s sister Chloe and her husband John for the Fourth of July weekend, during which comic and tragic memories, past relationships, and the unseen presence of their gay neighbors release unspoken feelings. Homophobic John is so fearful of AIDS that he will not swim because so many gay men live nearby, prompting Sally, thinking of her brother, to respond sarcastically, ‘‘I think we’re very brave to dangle our feet like this. They may fall off.’’ John attacks Sam for his inability to rein in Sally’s sarcasm, which only fuels her ire. Drinking a handful of water, she shouts, ‘‘Then let’s all get AIDS and die!’’ Injecting straight characters into a gay world, as he had similarly done more superficially in The Ritz, allows McNally to explore current attitudes about homosexuality and AIDS. This approach is most evident in Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994), for which McNally received the Pulitzer Prize. A bittersweet comedy about the close friendships of eight gay New Yorkers who spend holiday weekends at the country home of one of them, Love! Valour! Compassion! explores gay relationships of all sorts set against the problems of living with AIDS. Gregory, a celebrated choreographer, and his sweet-natured blind lover Bobby, live in a farmhouse where Gregory has his dance studio. Their guests include Arthur and Perry, who have been a couple for fourteen years; ‘‘We’re role models. It’s very stressful,’’ quips the acerbic Perry. HIV-positive Buzz Hauser, another guest, is a flamboyant musical comedy buff and costumer for Gregory’s dance troupe. Viciously sarcastic John, a British rehearsal pianist, is flooded with jealousy about the professional and personal success of the others and brings along Ramon, an ambitious young dancer who aspires to eclipse Gregory’s achievements. Ramon also attempts to woo Bobby from Gregory. John’s twin brother James, a gentle man dying of AIDS, joins the group and develops a close relationship with Buzz. The spectre of AIDS hangs heavily over all of the characters, and their fears and losses exacerbate their individual longings for love and commitment. Even John, who is often a pariah, and Ramon, who severely damages Gregory’s relationship with Bobby, expose their deepest fears and longings, but remain a part of this tightly knit group of friends who recognize that true community may be a form of redemption.

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Western Drama through the Ages The announcement of McNally’s Corpus Christi (1998) set off a firestorm of controversy at the time of its premiere at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Corpus Christi focuses on a group of gay men in Texas putting on a passion play about Jesus Christ’s life. It was attacked by various groups ostensibly concerned by the play’s connection of contemporary gay lives with Christ’s. Bomb threats and pickets accompanied the play’s opening, but the publicity only served to attract more interest in Corpus Christi than would have otherwise existed. In the play, thirteen actors play various biblical roles, debating varied beliefs about the lessons of the Bible’s account of Christ’s life. The intersection of biblical figures with the lives of the actors playing them permits McNally an opportunity of simultaneously revealing the stories of each character/actor. This wedding of the traditional and the contemporary, the ‘‘straight’’ version of the Bible and the ‘‘gay response’’ to it, is the play’s true purpose. In a preface to the published version of Corpus Christi, McNally writes that ‘‘I’m a playwright, not a theologian,’’ adding that the ‘‘level of dislike of gay men and the vehemence of the denial of any claim they might make for spiritual parity with their Christian ‘brothers’ that Corpus Christi revealed was disheartening.’’ In describing the work, McNally says that it is a ‘‘passion play’’ beginning with ‘‘the familiar dialogue with ourselves: Do I love my neighbor? Am I contributing good to the society in which I operate or nil? Do I, in fact, matter? Nothing more, nothing less. The play is more religious ritual than a play’’ and one that questions not only what was done to Christ, but what ‘‘they did one cold October night to a young man in Wyoming as well. Jesus Christ died again when Matthew Shepard did.’’ Curiously, only months after the Corpus Christi controversy, a similar play, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (1998) by Paul Rudnick (b. 1958), opened at the New York Theatre Workshop to virtually no public outcry. Rudnick had previously written Jeffrey (1995), a chronicle of a gay Everyman in contemporary America, and perhaps the play’s debut in a small off-Broadway venue kept it out of the media spotlight.

Activism in the Theater: Tony Kushner Despite the controversy engendered by Corpus Christi, it caused less furor than that which had accompanied productions of a previous gay-themed drama, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, an epic work consisting of two long plays, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Millennium Approaches (1991) and Perestroika (1992). Its author, Tony Kushner (b. 1956), was well-established as a director, adaptor, and playwright in regional theaters prior to Angels, but he was thrust into the forefront of American drama when Angels reached Broadway following critically acclaimed runs at San Francisco’s Eureka Theatre, Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum, and the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain. Angels raises complex questions regarding the future of American society in the wake of

Gay Drama Reagan’s presidency, particularly in the areas of morality, politics, and sexuality. Kushner wonders if a nation can be considered truly moral if it oppresses any of its citizenry. Angels suggests the inevitability of change and, with a mixture of outrageous humor and heartrending drama, Kushner peers into the unknown future to ponder whether apocalypse is inevitable or a brighter, more progressive tomorrow is possible. Examining a few individuals in the intimacy of their private lives at moments of profound personal crisis, Kushner considers the impact of history, as well as prevailing societal and political conditions, on their troubled lives. Angels features a range of gay characters—some closeted, some not—dealing with the problems of being homosexual in the darkest hours of the mounting AIDS crisis and at the height of the neo-conservative Reagan revolution. Kushner, who came of age in an era of profound change in the American cultural landscape, is inspired, in part, by dramatists of the Stonewall generation and after, as well as classical German romanticisim, Bertolt Brecht’s epic theater, and the poetic realism of mid-twentieth century American drama as exemplified by Williams. Kushner also found inspiration in the messages of activist gay organizations ACT UP and Queer Nation, whose chant, ‘‘We’re here, we’re queer, we’re fabulous,’’ pervades Angels. Contemporary American society is in an age of intellectual and moral stagnation, Kushner believes, an era of staggering political and social crisis, and Angels insists that the moral emptiness experienced in postmodern America results from an abandonment of its founding principles of justice, compassion, and liberty. Angels in America The first part of the play, Millennium Approaches, begins at the funeral of an elderly Jewish woman, Sarah Ironson, described by the presiding rabbi as an exemplar of Old World values. Having established the death of past certitudes which are the foundation of accepted values, Kushner sets his characters adrift with only the wreckage of the past to both guide and burden them. The play focuses on Joe and Harper Pitt, an unhappily married Mormon couple, and Prior Walter and Louis Ironson (the grandson of the deceased woman), a gay couple. These characters are all enduring personal crises when their lives intersect with historical figure Roy Cohn, who won fame (or infamy) as primary aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the House Un-American Activities Committee anticommunist ‘‘witchhunts’’ of the 1950s. Early in the play, Cohn, now a prominent New York divorce lawyer, learns he is suffering from full-blown AIDS. Joe, a conservative lawyer, is encouraged by Cohn, who hopes to place Joe in a Justice Department job as his man in Washington, but Joe is caught up in a personal struggle with his long-repressed homosexuality. He has been raised with traditional values: to be a family man, devoutly religious, and politically

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Western Drama through the Ages conservative. However, it is all slipping away as his true nature surfaces. In an agonized plea to Harper, who demands that Joe tell her whether or not he is, in fact, a homosexual, Joe exclaims: ‘‘Does it make any difference? That I might be one thing deep within, no matter how wrong or ugly that thing is, so long as I have fought, with everything I have, to kill it. What do you want from me, Harper? More than that? For God’s sake, there’s nothing left, I’m a shell. There’s nothing left to kill. As long as my behavior is what I know it has to be. Decent. Correct. That alone in the eyes of God.’’ When Joe finally acknowledges his homosexuality, he telephones his mother, Hannah, in the middle of the night, painfully revealing his secret in a scene that mirrors the experiences of many homosexuals—Kushner himself has said that this scene is taken directly from his own ‘‘coming out’’ experience. Joe subsequently meets Louis, who is in a desperate flight of fear from his longtime lover Prior, who has revealed that he is HIV-positive. Racked with guilt, the liberal Louis reflects on the Reagan era which he sees as a metaphor for his own bad faith. Meanwhile, Harper, addicted to Valium, and Prior, delirious as he becomes sicker, meet in a mutual hallucination where Harper comes to terms with Joe’s true sexual nature. Prior attempts to find hope despite his physical ills and emotional despair, employing camp humor to cope with his suffering. He insists that he is not a ‘‘typical homosexual,’’ jokingly adding that he is ‘‘stereotypical.’’ Kushner imbues Cohn with a darker brand of humor drawn from his rapacious corruption. Cohn’s self-loathing is at the heart of the play’s most unsettling depiction of homosexuality, manifested in Cohn’s deep, angry denial: ‘‘Like all labels they tell you one thing and one thing only: where does an individual so identified fit in the food chain, in the pecking order? Not ideology, or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout.’’ Suggesting that he could not possibly be considered a homosexual because he is a political force, Cohn sneers that ‘‘Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who in fifteen years of trying cannot get a pissant antidiscrimination bill through City Council. Homosexuals are men who know nobody and who nobody knows.’’ Kushner’s scathing view of Cohn as an exemplar of the excesses of twentieth century American conservatism is balanced by a similarly harsh view of Louis’s liberal politics, which he finds self-righteous and ineffectual. Louis meets his match in Belize, a gay African American nurse and close friend of Prior, who also becomes Cohn’s caregiver in Perestroika. Angry at the inherent bigotry and homophobia he finds on both sides of the political spectrum, Belize tells Louis: ‘‘I hate this country. It’s just big ideas, and stories, and people dying, and people like you. The white cracker who wrote the national anthem knew what he was doing. He set the word ‘free’ to a note so high nobody can reach it.’’ And of Louis specifically, Belize proposes that his liberalism has him ‘‘Up in the air, just like that

Gay Drama angel, too far off the earth to pick out the details’’ or, presumably, to respond to them in any effective way, either personally or politically. Throughout both plays, Prior grapples with the politics of existence humanely and compassionately, transcending the traditionally adversarial poles of conservatism or liberalism. At the end of Millennium Approaches, an angel appears to Prior in his delirium, bringing either death or redemption. Frightened, Prior resists his fears in a speech Kushner clearly intends to destroy stereotypes of weakness expressed earlier in the play by Cohn. ‘‘I can handle pressure, I am a gay man and I am used to pressure, to trouble, I am tough and strong,’’ Prior proclaims, and this viewpoint is reiterated in the final scene of Perestroika, which is set five years after the rest of Angels. Some of the characters meet at the Bethesda fountain in Central Park, with its statue of an angel, a figure commemorating death but suggesting ‘‘a world without dying.’’ Prior, whose AIDS symptoms have stabilized, points out that the healing waters of the fountain are not presently flowing, but he hopes to be around to see the day the waters flow again. Speaking for those gay characters who have come before him and for those suffering in the age of AIDS, Prior says, ‘‘This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won’t die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.’’

RECENT GAY DRAMA Gay-themed plays proliferated after the mid-1990s, although most subsequent playwrights have followed models created by Williams, Fierstein, Kramer, McNally, and Kushner. Standing out among more recent gay dramatists is Richard Greenberg (b. 1958), whose acclaimed Take Me Out (2003) mixes drama and comedy to imagine what might happen if a popular major league baseball player publicly announced his homosexuality. Take Me Out drew large audiences, tapping into changing American attitudes about gays at the dawn of the twentyfirst century. Like the acclaimed film Brokeback Mountain (2005), which explores homosexuality among traditionally hyper-masculine cowboys, Take Me Out brings American gay drama full circle. Like many of the gay plays of the past decade, it makes clear that gay men and women are present in all walks of American life; some are noble, others are not, but the long process of disposing of the ‘‘closet’’ may be ending in the transition to the new millennium.

FURTHER READING Baker, Rob. The Art of AIDS. New York: Continuum, 1994. Bernstein, Robin. Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

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Western Drama through the Ages Clum, John M. Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. ———. Still Acting Gay: Male Homosexuality in Modern Drama. New York: Palgrave/ Macmillan 2000. Curtin, Kaier. ‘‘We Can Always Call Them Bulgarians’’: The Emergence of Lesbians and Gay Men on the American Stage. Boston: Alyson, 1987. Fisher, James. The Theatre of Tony Kushner: Living Past Hope. New York: Routledge, 2001. ———, ed. Tony Kushner: New Essays on the Art and Politics of the Plays. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishers, Inc., 2006. Frantzen, Allen J. Before the Closet: Same-Sex Love From Beowulf to Angels in America. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998. Geis, Deborah R. and Steven F. Kruger, eds. Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Harbin, Billy J., Kim Marra, and Robert A. Schanke. The Gay & Lesbian Theatrical Legacy. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2005. Kauffmann, Stanley, ‘‘Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises.’’ New York Times January 23, 1966, Section 2, p. 1. Kaufman, David. Ridiculous! The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam. New York: Applause Books, 2002. Kolin, Philip C., ed. The Undiscovered Country: The Later Plays of Tennessee Williams. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. Kolin, Philip C., and Colby H. Kullman. Speaking on Stage. Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 1996. Kramer, Larry. Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Ludlam, Charles, and Steven Samuels. Ridiculous Theatre: Scourge of Human Folly: The Essays and Opinions of Charles Ludlam. New York: Theatre Communications Group, Inc., 1992. Mass, Lawrence D. We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 1999. McDonough, Carla J. Staging Masculinity. Male Identity in Contemporary American Drama. Jefferson, North Carolina and London: McFarland & Co., Inc., Publishers, 1997. McRuer, Robert. The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities. New York: New York University Press, 1997. Paller, Michael. Gentlemen Callers: Tennessee Williams, Homosexuality, and Mid-Twentieth Century Drama. New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2005. Roma´n, David. Acts of Intervention. Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1998. Savran, David. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1992. Schanke, Robert A., and Kimberly B. Marra. Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theatre History. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Schulman, Sarah. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1998.

Gay Drama Sinfield, Alan. Out on Stage: Lesbian and Gay Theatre in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1999. Solomon, Alisa. Re-Dressing the Canon. Essays on Theater and Gender. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Solomon, Alisa and Framji Minwalla. The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Vorlicky, Robert H. Act Like a Man: Challenging Masculinities in American Drama. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994. ———, ed. Tony Kushner in Conversation. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Williams, Tennessee. Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, 1975. ———. Where I Live. Selected Essays. Edited by Christine R. Day and Bob Woods. New York: A New Directions Books, 1978. p. 72. Zimna, Silverman. Terrence McNally: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1997.

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Gender and Theater Gwendolyn N. Hale

Wendy Wasserstein captured the plight of gender and theater when she stated, ‘‘[T]here aren’t enough plays by women—by and about women.’’ Those plays authored by and concerning women often bear the unfair burden of being representative of all female plays and characters. Such a title is simply unfair. In fact, female playwrights such as Wasserstein often find themselves the target of many feminist criticisms for not being more ‘‘feminist.’’ While theater has certainly freed itself from many of the heavier, confining shackles of gender stereotypes and limitations such as the way in which women and men are portrayed and written about, gender roles are continually being defined and renegotiated on the stage. The theater has become a tricky medium for gender and sex as both continue to be volatile subjects politically and, in turn, artistically. Male and female playwrights alike tackle the issues associated with gender in a variety of fashions. Interesting, however, are the ways in which contemporary female dramatists approach masculine and feminine roles within their drama. Leading the charge (perhaps unintentionally) of female playwrights engaging gender and gender biases within their works are Naomi Wallace, Paula Vogel, and Marsha Norman.

NAOMI WALLACE The issue of gender is not a simple one, and it extends far beyond costumes and character assignments. In fact, both men and women write plays for and about other men and women. A great deal of the difficulty in defining gender in today’s theater comes from audiences’ limited and arbitrary language. Most audiences still define gender as strictly male or female and pay no mind to those whose

Gender and Theater gender defies the absolute and confining labels of male and female. Naomi Wallace’s The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, while it does not set out to solely address issues of gender, does touch on gender roles with its two main characters Dalton and Pace. With Dalton and Pace, Wallace effectively blurs the boundaries between traditional male and female roles and characteristics. For Pace, trauma has blurred all real distinctions in her life. Through apparent ridicule and even emotional neglect, Pace Creagan has become tough both emotionally and physically. In one of the first scenes of the play, Dalton points out Pace’s apparent lack of female characteristics. Not only does she bring a pair of her brother’s pants to wear to run the trestle, Dalton tells her, ‘‘You don’t talk like a girl. Should.’’ Ignoring the ridicule in Dalton’s observation, Pace thanks him for it. This scene is one of the first indications that Pace is relatively free from the confines of gender as her world cannot harbor femininity or any other trait that might be construed as a weakness given the time period and its perceptions of gender. Along with her absence of femininity, we also find a profound lack of connection with other females. She talks about their friend Mary Ellen much like a male would with comments such as, ‘‘I’d say she was on the menu. Front, back, and in reverse.’’ Pace does not mention other females very much except that even when she pays Mary Ellen a compliment, she couples it with a memory of how she could exert control over Mary Ellen. Pace would instruct her to take off her clothes and Mary Ellen would comply. Gender is a luxury that would allow Pace a clearly defined role by which to conform. However, Pace’s world, while free from the fetters of stereotypical gender roles, is complicated by the fact that she must forge her own path. No one in her life can instruct her on how to be a strong, independent female. She is in a purgatory of gender roles in that she is neither wholly male nor female, and she must define who she is independently of any previous definitions ignoring Dalton’s expectations and anger. The cause of Dalton’s anger is profound sexual frustration. In one scene prior to her running the trestle, Pace refuses to kiss Dalton on the mouth because ‘‘that’s common,’’ so she kisses him on the back of the knee for ten seconds as she makes Dalton count. Pace also tells Dalton to take off his clothes so she can merely look at him. Again, his hopes for sex are destroyed when Pace tells him to get dressed. Dalton desperately wants Pace to be like other girls, but Pace sees Dalton as a very nice boy who will have to be, sooner or later, ‘‘[broken] in half,’’ and she assumes the duty of doing so. She makes Dalton feel like a fool even though she does not mean to. Dalton is at Pace’s mercy in that she defies the characteristics of the typical girls Dalton knows. The life Dalton wants is one in which Pace allows him to be the dominant partner and one in which she acquiesces to sex. Pace has her own ideas about sex and love, and Dalton cannot reconcile her ideas with his own sexual frustration. Pace opens up a Pandora’s Box of sorts for Dalton in that she has told him of another way to live but given him no instruction or hope

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PAULA VOGEL Where Wallace’s Pace exerts control and power, Paula Vogel’s character Li’l Bit, in How I Learned to Drive, is an intelligent woman whose possibilities and experiences have been limited because of sexual abuse from her uncle and fireand-brimstone talks from her grandmother regarding sex. Like Pace, Li’l Bit is held captive by limitations. While Pace’s prison stems from socioeconomics, Li’l Bit’s results from her own femininity. That which makes her a woman perplexes her and makes her self-conscious. When her mother and grandmother are discussing sex, Li’l Bit asks, ‘‘Why does everything have to hurt for girls? Why is there always blood?’’ Li’l Bit’s seemingly simple and innocent questions are met with opposing answers. The mother attempts to be honest and inform her daughter that there is some discomfort, but sex is beautiful if it occurs with someone Li’l Bit is in love with. Still, the grandmother’s retorts are from a darker, stricter time as she tells her granddaughter about sex: ‘‘You’ll bleed like stuck pig! And you lay there and say, ‘Why O Lord, have you forsaken me?!’’’ With her uncle sexually abusing her from age eleven and her grandmother and mother offering conflicting views about sex, it is little wonder Li’l Bit finds her own womanhood burdensome. Li’l Bit’s breasts are much larger than most of the girls in her school. Her breasts are an outward manifestation of her sexual maturity, yet Li’l Bit is not sexually mature in the least. Her questions go unanswered, and the only clues she is given are the sexual advances from her uncle. Her uncle has stunted her sexual maturation by taking advantage of her at a very young age. Her breasts, as Li’l Bit points out, are cumbersome, and most boys only want to dance with her so they can watch them jiggle. Not only do the boys tease her about them, but so do the girls

Gender and Theater in her gym class. Betrayed by both her male and female counterparts, Li’l Bit retreats back into the arms of her abusive Uncle Peck. Uncle Peck embodies the manipulation experiences throughout her childhood and adolescence. Uncle Peck is the one person in Li’l Bit’s life who tells her she is beautiful and attempts to explain the ways of the world, particularly her peers’ reactions to her breasts and beauty. Li’l Bit is manipulated by a pedophile, a desperate man clinging to his youth by attempting to win the love of a much younger girl. As Uncle Peck showers Li’l Bit with gifts and attention, the most damaging actions come from those who tell Li’l Bit how she should and should not act: Never drink on an empty stomach; throw up in the ladies’ room if intoxicated; don’t have sex; wear a skin-tight girdle. With all this instruction, no one tells Li’l Bit the reasoning behind such precautions and actions. She remains naive, confused, and unfocused. Li’l Bit is intelligent and wants to ‘‘rise above [her] cracker background.’’ However, when she tells her family of her plans, they negate her confidence and aspirations by reverting the conversation back to her body. Her grandfather argues, ‘‘Shakespeare is really going to help you in life.. . .How is Shakespeare going to help [you] lie on [your] back in the dark?’’ Here, along with her uncle’s abuse, men’s reactions to her, and women’s reactions to her, Li’l Bit finds all emphasis placed on her body, and her value as a woman is measured by her body and sexuality. Further, any anger and betrayal Li’l Bit may feel is replaced by guilt and social restrictions. When she becomes angry in high school for Jerome grabbing her breasts and insinuating her bra is padded, the Teenage Greek Chorus blames her: ‘‘Rage is not attractive in a girl’’ Then, just before the first time Li’l Bit is molested by her uncle, her mother unknowingly affixes permanent guilt and silence onto her daughter by stating, ‘‘I’m warning you—if anything happens, I hold you responsible.’’ From this day forward, Li’l Bit must accept her fate as she is responsible for what happens to her even though she has never been armed with the weapons by which to defend herself. This lack of defense is a natural progression for Li’l Bit because Li’l Bit’s grandmother told her mother the same thing when she (Lucy) got pregnant. She forced her to have the baby on her own saying, ‘‘I hold you responsible.’’ Vogel utilizes the abuse by the uncle and the ways in which men and women are taught to drive, the former aggressively and the latter submissively and apologetically, to demonstrate the victimization of women through long-held beliefs and societal indoctrination.

MARSHA NORMAN In Marsha Norman’s ’Night, Mother, victimization is demonstrated on the domestic front without the physical presence of males. The play begins as an innocuous account of a mother-daughter relationship that eventually manifests itself as a power struggle between two women. Jessie’s life is one of limitation

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Western Drama through the Ages and stagnation; she lives with her mother after he marriage fails and her son turns out to be a thief. Further, Jessie is haunted by epilepsy and a life of unfulfilled dreams. As the play opens, Jessie asks her mother for her dead father’s revolver, and she calmly announces she is going to kill herself. Jessie’s mother, like everyone else in Jessie’s life, does not take her seriously when she clearly states she is going to end her own life. Initially, Jessie exhibits profound female characteristics. Of the two residing in the house, Jessie is the maternal one; she takes charge of all the details of her mother’s life. This role-reversal is cruel in that no one ever nurtures Jessie. Her strength never wanes as she makes list after list of things her mother needs. The play opens with her mother relying wholly on Jessie for her happiness: ’’Jessie, it’s the last snowball, sugar. Put it on the list, O.K.? And we’re out of Hershey bars and where’s that peanut brittle?’’ The mother has regressed to the mentality of a child, and she lives in the moment. She relies on the sensual pleasures and instant gratification of candy and has little interaction with other humans other than her children, Agnes and Dawson. Mostly, however, she just has TV. Jessie has ceased to be a daughter and has been cast in the role of servant. While Jessie prepares to kill herself in the least messy way possible, Mama reminds Jessie that it is Saturday night and her nails need to be done. Jessie responds, ‘‘I know. I got it on the schedule.’’ Jessie’s world revolves around serving her mother. Cleaning and attending to her mother’s every whim, Jessie exhibits stereotypical feminine characteristics as she must get everything in order before committing suicide. She gathers old towels and plastic in order to cover the floor of her bedroom so that she does not make a mess for her mother. Jessie spends the last hours of her life getting everything in order for her mother who has never really had to care for herself. Soon, Jessie blurs the boundaries of masculinity and femininity when she tells her mother to wash her hands so she can give her a manicure. In the meantime, she is going up to get her father’s gun from the attic. This revolver is the only thing her father has really left her, and it is a means by which to end her miserable life. Next, Jessie begins cleaning the gun very skillfully much as a man would do: ‘‘Jessie sits with the gun and starts cleaning it, pushing the cylinder out, checking to see that the chambers and barrel are empty, then putting some oil on a small patch of cloth and pushing it through the barrel with the push rod that was in the box.’’ Jessie intends to kill herself with her father’s revolver. A firearm is a profoundly masculine way to kill oneself, and there is little chance for Jessie to be saved from a self-inflicted bullet wound. With Jessie’s suicide comes a power struggle. Jessie struggles under the weight of her past, memories of her family, and the life that has ceased to be hers. First, although all the characters on the stage are female, male characters

Gender and Theater permeate the present, thus becoming presences. Jessie’s son, Ricky, is a thief, and their relationship has been destroyed beyond repair. Further, Jessie’s brother, Dawson, is dominating and exerts power over her and her mother. He uses his money as a means of maintaining dominance and power over his mother and sister. Finally, Jessie’s father was the one person she could relate to, and her mother despised him. Jessie attempts to defend her father within the last moments of her life, and her mother replies, ‘‘How could I love him, Jessie. I didn’t have a thing he wanted. . . .You loved him enough for both of us.’’ All Jessie has are memories, and even those are not that great. The only control Jessie has of her own life is to end it; all other aspects are controlled by someone else. Still, Mama refuses to acknowledge the fact that Jessie is her own woman and no longer needs this world or her trivial, small life with her mother. The play culminates in heartbreak. Jessie’s will prevails, and she whispers, ‘‘ ’Night, Mother’’ (Norman 1983,57). Separated by Jessie’s locked bedroom door, Mama is emotionally no closer to Jessie now than when Jessie was alive. Mama threatens to do things against Jessie’s orders in a selfish attempt to keep her around and to not have to feel the guilt that Jessie’s suicide will bring. Mama screams, ’’Jessie! . . .I didn’t know! I was here with you all the time. How could I know you were so alone? . . .I thought you were mine.’’ With the sound of a gunshot, Mama makes a phone call to Dawson to come and take care of the details of Jessie’s death. The play and Jessie’s life come to a conclusion. While gender does not directly impact the course of events of Norman’s play, Norman does examine the dynamics of a mother-daughter relationship that has reversed itself. Jessie, a woman who has never had control of her own life, asserts herself in death. Like Pace Creagan in The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek, Jessie is able to free herself from the confines of her life and her gender. Power and gender seem to play an integral role in many of the plays of female dramatists. The three aforementioned plays all demonstrate a power struggle of sorts, and often gender factors into the struggle. Pace and Dalton struggle to free themselves from the confines of their socioeconomic status as Pace attempts to define gender is some way that allows her to be the person she longs to be. Li’l Bit struggles with her blossoming womanhood as her uncle molests her by exerting control over her. Because of Uncle Peck’s sexual dominance over Li’l Bit, she perpetuates the cycle and exercises dominance over her sexual partners. For Li’l Bit, sex becomes a weapon by which to gain power and control. Finally, for Jessie, she struggles with her mother for the right to kill herself. Her mother has always dominated the relationship, and Mama cannot stand the idea that she will not be able to control her daughter any longer.

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GENDER’S MANY ROLES IN DRAMA Few would argue that all relationships are based on some sort of power hierarchy. Male and female playwrights often focus on such power structures and bring them to the stage in an attempt to address such conflicts in everyday life. Gender is a terrifically fluid term, particularly when used with regards to drama, and often brings to the fore different tensions. Moreover, many still believe that one is either born male or female. According to Judith Butler, however, gender is unnatural as well as a social construction. No matter the intent behind the use of gender, the politics of masculinity and femininity are present. Whether a character is oppressed by her gender, imprisoned by her sexuality, or simply struggling with her role in the family, expectations of males and females remain. Whether a play is feminist or is simply dealing with everyday issues, gender is inescapable; its manifestations simply beg the audience to examine the play and their own long-held beliefs in a new way.

FURTHER READING Barnett, Claudia. ‘‘Dialectic and the Drama of Naomi Wallace.’’ Southern Women Playwrights: New Essays in Literary History and Criticism. Edited by Robert L. McDonald and Linda Rohrer Paige. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Butler, Judith. ‘‘Variations on Sex and Gender.’’ The Judith Butler Reader. Edited by Sara Salih and Judith Butler. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Norman, Marsha. ’Night, Mother. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1983. Vogel, Paula. How I Learned to Drive. New York: Dramatists Play Service Inc., 1998. Wallace, Naomi. The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek. In the Heart of America and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001.


Musical Theater Gary Konas

ORIGINS AND PRECURSORS OF THE AMERICAN MUSICAL Although the Broadway musical is considered one of America’s original art forms, it actually comes from several European sources. John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), a British play which mixed dialogue with ballads, is one of the earliest ancestors to the modern musical. The German-born Jacques Offenbach wrote several ope´ra-bouffes performed in Paris, beginning in 1855, which are closer to American-type musical theater. Also, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan perfected the form of comic operetta in England with such works as H. M. S. Pinafore (1878), The Pirates of Penzance (1880), and The Mikado (1885). The wild popularity of the New York production of Pinafore had a tremendous influence on America’s attitude toward musical theater. The Black Crook (1866) is commonly thought of as being the first American musical. This five-hour extravaganza is still remembered as part of showbusiness lore, even though it probably had less lasting influence on the American musical than did its European counterparts. Soon after, Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart’s Mulligan Guards musical plays (1877–85, music by David Braham) featured comic conflicts among Irish, German, and black residents of New York. During the 1890s, European-trained Reginald de Koven enjoyed success on Broadway with such early musicals as Robin Hood (1891). Meanwhile, operetta flourished in Europe. Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow (1905) opened in Vienna and became incredibly successful throughout Europe and America, arriving in New York to considerable acclaim in 1907. The twentieth century American musical began with a British import, Florodora (1900), which enjoyed great popularity. Victor Herbert composed several memorable ‘‘comic

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Western Drama through the Ages operas,’’ including Babes in Toyland (1903) and Naughty Marietta (1910). George M. Cohan, one of the most popular performers of his day, wrote the book and score for Little Johnny Jones (1904), which gave America ‘‘The Yankee Doodle Boy’’ and ‘‘Give My Regards to Broadway.’’ By this time the theater district, formerly centered downtown, was moving uptown to Times Square, centered around Broadway between 42nd and 49th Streets. Along with the musical comedy and European-style operetta, a third form of musical called ‘‘revue’’ developed with The Passing Show (1894). Producer Florenz Ziegfeld made this genre world-famous in 1907 with the first of his annual Follies. Unlike other musical forms, revues simply presented production numbers, comedy skits, and vaudeville acts. Ziegfeld patterned his shows on the French revue, with its emphasis on topical satire, and he spared no expense when it came to costumes, performers (including Bert Williams and Fanny Brice), and songwriters, most notably Irving Berlin.

THE MUSICAL IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 1915–40 During the 1910s Jerome Kern perfected the form of the ‘‘book’’ musical (i.e., one with a libretto that tells a story) with several works, including Very Good Eddie (1915) and Leave It to Jane (1917). If Kern was the father of the American musical, George Gershwin was its first genius. In his 38 years he wrote not only musical comedy, but also jazz, symphonic music, and opera. With his lyricist brother Ira he wrote outstanding scores for Lady, Be Good (1924; such as ‘‘Fascinating Rhythm’’),1 Oh, Kay! (1926; ‘‘Someone to Watch Over Me’’), Funny Face (1927; ‘‘’S Wonderful’’), Girl Crazy (1930; ‘‘I Got Rhythm’’), and Of Thee I Sing (1931). With Ira and playwright DuBose Heyward, Gershwin created an enduring American opera, Porgy and Bess (1935; ‘‘Summertime,’’ ‘‘Bess, You Is My Woman Now’’). Today’s greatest songwriter Stephen Sondheim perhaps put it best when he said, ‘‘There’s Porgy and Bess, then there’s everything else.’’ Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart rose to prominence during the 1920s and built upon this success during the following decade. Their excellent scores included A Connecticut Yankee (1927), Babes in Arms (1937; ‘‘The Lady Is a Tramp,’’ ‘‘My Funny Valentine’’), and The Boys from Syracuse (1938; ‘‘Falling in Love with Love’’). Rodgers had a great gift for melody and complex harmonies, while Hart’s love-song lyrics (e.g., ‘‘Spring Is Here’’) tended toward cynicism and melancholy, matching his tortured personality. Although musical comedy had always included some dance, On Your Toes (1936; ‘‘There’s a Small Hotel’’) innovatively included ballet (‘‘Slaughter on Tenth Avenue’’), thus paving the way for shows Rodgers would later write with Oscar Hammerstein II.

Musical Theater Rodgers and Hart’s last great show, Pal Joey (1940; ‘‘Bewitched’’), was criticized for having an unlikeable main character and was only later fully appreciated for its dramatic quality. Cole Porter was an American composer-lyricist whose career was slowed by years of party-going in Europe with his wife Linda. He nevertheless managed to write a number of witty, sophisticated scores for Fifty Million Frenchmen (1929), Anything Goes (1934; ‘‘You’re the Top’’), Red, Hot, and Blue (1936; ‘‘De-Lovely’’), Leave It to Me (1938; ‘‘My Heart Belongs to Daddy’’), Kiss Me, Kate (1948; ‘‘So in Love’’), and Can-Can (1953; ‘‘I Love Paris’’). His multilayered love songs (e.g., ‘‘Begin the Beguine’’) often hid melancholy, despair, double-entendre, and/ or homosexual longing beneath the happy exterior of his music and lyrics. Although Broadway built its reputation on the ‘‘book’’ musical during the 1920s and 1930s, revues continued to entertain audiences on Broadway. Ziegfeld’s success with his Follies brought competition from others, most notably George White’s Scandals (beginning 1919). Less spectacular revues relying on solid scores included The Band Wagon (1931; ‘‘Dancing in the Dark’’), with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz. Irving Berlin’s Music Box Revue (1921; ‘‘Say It with Music’’) and Harold Rome’s Pins and Needles (1937) also enjoyed solid runs. The comedy sketches in these shows tended to be topical. Berlin, considered the god of American popular song (‘‘God Bless America’’), also wrote the memorable musical Annie Get Your Gun (1946, ‘‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’’). America’s appetite for operetta continued throughout the 1920s, especially in the works of Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml. These shows were often set in mythical Central European countries known collectively as ‘‘Ruritania,’’ or else they took place in the distant American past. The lush, romantic scores usually had an operatic vocal sweep. Romberg scored with Blossom Time (1921) and The Student Prince (1924). Also in 1924, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the popular operetta Rose-Marie (‘‘Indian Love Call’’) with Rudolf Friml. In 1927 Kern and Hammerstein created Show Boat, which was a true musical drama and the forerunner to all serious musicals since. The score’s songs—which included ‘‘Ol’ Man River,’’ ‘‘Make Believe,’’ and ‘‘Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man’’— developed character and advanced the plot. The stories for most musicals during this period ran the gamut from silly to forgettable, and before Show Boat they did not integrate song with story. Show Boat was certainly the first great Broadway musical and the triumph of Kern’s career, even though he continued to write solid musicals during the 1930s, most notably Roberta (1933; ‘‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’’). British writers wrote decent operettas during the period—most notably, Frederick Norton and Oscar Asche’s Chu Chin Chow (1916), which ran for over 2,200 performances in London. Overall, 1920s British audiences preferred operettas

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Western Drama through the Ages imported from America, many of which were adapted into at least one successful film. After 1930, however, several British composers rose to prominence. Noel Gay’s Me and My Girl (1937; ‘‘The Lambeth Walk’’) was popular in its day and reborn in a popular London and New York revival in 1985–86. Ivor Novello was a popular English actor who wrote several musicals, most notably The Dancing Years (1939), which remain virtually unknown in America. By contrast, actordirector-playwright-composer-lyricist Noel Coward became well-known in America with such shows as Bitter Sweet (1929; ‘‘I’ll See You Again’’).

The Musical in the United States and Great Britain, 1940–2000 After breaking up with Lorenz Hart (who soon died), Richard Rodgers established a partnership with librettist-lyricist Oscar Hammerstein, becoming the most successful team in American history. Oklahoma! (1943; ‘‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning’’) reminded wartime America of what they were fighting for, and the show ran for five years. The duo then wrote an even better musical, Carousel (1945; ‘‘If I Loved You’’). They also enjoyed great success with the hit-laden South Pacific (1949; ‘‘Bali Ha’i,’’ ‘‘This Nearly Was Mine’’), The King and I (1951; ‘‘Shall We Dance?’’), Flower Drum Song (1958; ‘‘I Enjoy Being a Girl’’), and The Sound of Music (1959; ‘‘Do Re Mi,’’ ‘‘Climb Every Mountain’’). All six of these shows have been preserved in relatively faithful film adaptations. These musical dramas, often including dance to help tell the story, took on such serious issues as spousal abuse, racism, and war while remaining very entertaining, thanks to Hammerstein’s soul and Rodgers’s musical brilliance. Alan Jay Lerner and German immigrant Frederick Loewe, after warming up with Brigadoon (1947) and Paint Your Wagon (1951), matched the fame of Rodgers and Hammerstein with My Fair Lady (1956). This adaptation of G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion, which made a star of Julie Andrews, still belongs on any ‘‘Top Five’’ list of American musicals, with its great story and solid gold score (‘‘I Could Have Danced All Night,’’ ‘‘Get Me to the Church on Time,’’ ‘‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’’). Another German immigrant, Kurt Weill, came to America and wrote the music for several shows, most notably Lady in the Dark (1941; ‘‘My Ship’’). The Three Penny Opera (1933), an adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera written in Germany with Bertolt Brecht, opened Off-Broadway in 1954 in its English translation (‘‘Mack the Knife’’), running over 2,200 performances. Harold Arlen, although a white songwriter, was best known for his blues songs (‘‘Stormy Weather,’’ ‘‘Blues in the Night’’), along with his score with lyricist E. Y. ‘‘Yip’’ Harburg for the immortal 1939 film The Wizard of Oz (‘‘Over the Rainbow’’). Harburg and Burton Lane wrote Finian’s Rainbow (1947), which took a light-hearted poke at Southern racism.

Musical Theater After the postwar ‘‘American invasion’’ of London by Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, several British songwriters emerged during the 1950s. Sandy Wilson wrote The Boy Friend (1954), a love letter to 1920s musical comedies. Lionel Bart had a huge hit in both London and New York with his adaptation of a Dickens novel, Oliver! (1960, London, 1963, New York; ‘‘Consider Yourself’’). Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse succeeded in both London and New York with Stop the World, I Want to Get Off (1961/62; ‘‘What Kind of Fool Am I?’’), which also starred Newley. Back in America, Frank Loesser wrote words and music for what may be Broadway’s most perfect musical comedy, Guys and Dolls (1950; ‘‘Luck Be a Lady’’). He also managed to turn office life into a Pulitzer Prize–winning show, How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1961; ‘‘I Believe in You’’). Several of Loesser’s prote´ge´s produced tuneful hit scores of their own: Robert Wright and George Forrest (Kismet, 1953), Richard Adler and Jerry Ross (The Pajama Game, 1954 and Damn Yankees, 1955), and Meredith Willson (The Music Man, 1957). In the 1960s composer-lyricist Jerry Herman began writing his own cheerfully melodic musicals, including Hello, Dolly! (1964), Mame (1966), and La Cage aux Folles (1983; ‘‘I Am What I Am’’). In contrast to all these traditional shows, the ‘‘American tribal love-rock’’ musical Hair (1968; ‘‘Good Morning Starshine,’’ ‘‘Aquarius’’), written by James Rado, Gerome Ragni, and composer Galt MacDermot, seemed very hip and contemporary at the time, but it hardly signaled the end of traditional musicals. More likely, the replacement of hit show tunes by rock-and-roll on radio had a larger effect on the decline of the Broadway musical as an influential popular medium. Nevertheless, the musical has remained the mainstay of Broadway for the past several decades, and shows such as Charles Strouse and Lee Adams’s Bye Bye Birdie (1960; ‘‘Put on a Happy Face’’) continue to thrive in community and high-school productions. And when a show really strikes a chord, it can seemingly run forever. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s The Fantasticks (‘‘Try to Remember’’) opened in a small Off-Broadway theater in 1960 and ran there for over 40 years. Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick set Broadway longevity records on Broadway with Fiddler on the Roof (1964; ‘‘If I Were a Rich Man,’’ ‘‘Sunrise, Sunset’’), which ran for eight years and was successfully revived in 2004. About the time this show closed, the 1950s rock musical Grease opened (1972; ‘‘Summer Nights’’). The only show written by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey, Grease also ran eight years on and off Broadway, spawning the 1978 hit film adaptation. A Chorus Line (1975; ‘‘What I Did for Love’’), by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban, ran an astounding 15 years, a record later to be eclipsed by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. John Kander and Fred Ebb’s Chicago (1975; ‘‘All That Jazz’’) enjoyed moderate success in its original 1975 production, as had their first hit Cabaret (1966), but

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Western Drama through the Ages the 1996 revival of Chicago was still running nine years later, even though by 2003 most musical lovers had seen the Oscar-winning film adaptation. Although most musicals live or die by the quality of their libretto and musical score, several famous musicals are best known for their directors and/or choreographers. Jerome Robbins directed and created dance for a number of memorable musicals, including On the Town (1944) and Fiddler on the Roof, being universally acknowledged as one of the true geniuses of the theater. Bob Fosse’s distinctive dance style (recognizable by his use of hats, hunched shoulders, and toed-in footwork) helped enliven such shows as Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, How to Succeed, Sweet Charity, and Chicago. Other influential choreographers include Agnes DeMille (Oklahoma!, Brigadoon), Jack Cole (Kismet, Forum), Michael Kidd (Guys and Dolls, Can-Can), and Gower Champion (Bye Bye Birdie, Hello, Dolly!, and 42nd Street [1980]). Currently Susan Stroman, with several recent hits to her credit (most notably The Producers [see below]), seems to be today’s hottest director-choreographer. Librettist-lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green worked together exclusively from the late 1930s until Green’s death in 2002. With composer Leonard Bernstein they wrote On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (1953). They wrote several shows with composer Jule Styne, including Bells Are Ringing (1956; ‘‘Just in Time,’’ ‘‘The Party’s Over’’). More recently they wrote On the Twentieth Century (1978) and The Will Rogers Follies (1991) with Cy Coleman. Coleman, who died in 2004 (as did Fred Ebb), was a jazz musician who wrote several sophisticated scores with other lyricists, including Carolyn Leigh (Wildcat, 1960; ‘‘Hey, Look Me Over’’), Dorothy Fields (Sweet Charity, 1966; ‘‘Big Spender’’), and Michael Stewart (Barnum, 1980). Styne launched Barbra Streisand’s stardom with Funny Girl (1964; ‘‘People’’), but his finest writing came in Gypsy (1959; ‘‘Everything’s Coming Up Roses’’), with lyricist Stephen Sondheim. Although Sondheim started as a lyricist on West Side Story (1957; ‘‘Maria’’) with composer Bernstein, after Gypsy he pursued his dream to write both music and lyrics with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962; ‘‘Comedy Tonight’’). His mentor had been Oscar Hammerstein, who taught him well. Indeed, Sondheim has reigned as the undisputed genius of the musical theater since 1970. Best known for ‘‘Send in the Clowns’’ from A Little Night Music (1973), Sondheim wrote the landmark ‘‘concept musical’’ Company (1970), a nonlinear, episodic exploration of bachelorhood and marriage. Equally bold and innovative were Follies (1971; ‘‘Broadway Baby’’), Sweeney Todd (1979), and Sunday in the Park with George (1984). His collaboration in the 1970s with producerdirector Harold Prince produced amazing work. Another type of show, one that might be called the ‘‘compilation revue,’’ is built around songs associated with one songwriter or performer. The most notable examples include Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well. . . (Brel, 1968), Side by Side by

Musical Theater Sondheim (1977), Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Fats Waller, 1978), Sophisticated Ladies (Duke Ellington, 1981), and Smokey Joe’s Cafe´ (Lieber and Stoller, 1995). More recently Broadway shows have been built around the collected songs of ABBA (Mamma Mia!, 2002) and Billy Joel (Movin’ Out, 2002). During what became the ‘‘Age of Sondheim’’ in America, in Great Britain composer Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote Jesus Christ, Superstar (1971; ‘‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’’) and Evita (1979; ‘‘Don’t Cry for Me Argentina’’) with lyricist Tim Rice. During this time a new sub-genre, the ‘‘megamusical,’’ became the dominant form. These large-scale shows, often produced in London by Cameron Macintosh, made stage effects the real stars, and several of them had no libretto, relying entirely on songs. Lloyd Webber’s Cats (1981 London, 1982 New York; ‘‘Memory’’), a spectacle about singing, dancing cats, ran 21 years in London and 18 years on Broadway. Lloyd Webber’s immensely popular The Phantom of the Opera (1986 London, 1988 New York; ‘‘The Music of the Night’’), which ‘‘starred’’ a crashing chandelier, was finally filmed in 2004. Alain Boublil and ClaudeMichel Scho¨nberg’s Les Mise`rables (1980 Paris, 1985 London, 1987 New York; ‘‘Do You Hear the People Sing?’’) became a multi-billion-dollar franchise around the world, playing nearly 6,700 performances in New York alone. The team had another hit in London and New York with Miss Saigon (1989–91), which featured a helicopter appearing to land on stage. Yet another French musical, Notre Dame de Paris (1998), has enjoyed great success in Europe. Lloyd Webber’s star has dimmed lately, with such recent musicals as The Beautiful Game (2000) and The Woman in White (2004) failing to match his past shows’ huge popularity. At age 75 Sondheim also struggled to regain his past magic. His musical comedy Bounce failed to show enough promise in its 2004 Chicago and Washington DC productions to lead to a Broadway opening, at least as of 2005. Two other composer-lyricists must be mentioned. Stephen Schwartz had youthful hits with Godspell (1971; ‘‘Day by Day’’) and Pippin (1972; ‘‘Magic to Do’’), and after years of writing scores for Disney films, he has returned to Broadway with the immensely popular Wicked (2004), the Oz story told from the witches’ perspective. William Finn’s witty Falsettos (1992), which was a compilation of two earlier one-act musicals, followed gay Jewish characters through various family problems, including AIDS. His 2005 Off-Broadway musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee was universally praised, stimulating a move to a larger Broadway theater.

TRENDS AND THE FUTURE FOR THE AMERICAN MUSICAL THEATER The current trend in America is toward adapting familiar films into musicals. In 2001 Mel Brooks adapted his 1968 film The Producers into a blockbuster that

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Western Drama through the Ages struggled somewhat after the exit of its stars Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. This success was closely followed by Mark Shaiman and Scott Wittman’s Hairspray, the biggest hit of 2002–3, which was based on the John Waters film of the same title. The trend continued in 2005 with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Monty Python’s Spamalot (based on Monty Python and the Holy Grail). With the price of mounting a new musical exceeding $10 million, many producers want to have a bankable title and plot to build upon. The Disney corporation has, indeed, led this trend with its Broadway adaptations of Beauty and the Beast (1994) and The Lion King (1997), with Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (2002) and Mary Poppins (2004) flying over to New York from London engagements. In contrast to these spectaculars, several younger songwriters have devoted themselves to creating more intimate, intelligent musical theater. Jonathan Larson unfortunately died before his breakthrough hit Rent (1996; ‘‘Seasons of Love’’) opened. The show is currently moving toward its 4,000th Broadway performance. Most of his contemporaries, including Alan Menken (Little Shop of Horrors, 1982), Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens (Ragtime, 1998), Michael John LaChiusa (The Wild Party, 2000), Jeanine Tesori (Violet, 1996), Jason Robert Brown (Parade, 1998), and Adam Guettel (Floyd Collins, 1995), have all either shunned or struggled to find commercial success with their earnest, high-minded musicals. However, Hairspray reminded everyone that popular musicals can be smart, fun, and lucrative. So has Avenue Q (2004), essentially an R-rated Muppet show with a clever score by newcomers Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx. The American theater has been the ‘‘fabulous invalid’’ for over 100 years. But just as musical theater survived the twentieth century worldwide despite economic pressures, it will probably continue to entertain audiences through the twenty-first century, as long as talented people keep it breathing with song and dance.

NOTE 1. Parenthetical information after show titles includes the year of first production and a key song from the musical.

FURTHER READING Bordman, Gerald. American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Everett, William A. and Paul R. Laird, eds. The Cambridge Companion to the Musical. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Green, Stanley. Broadway Musicals Show by Show. 3rd ed. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1990. Henderson, Amy and Dwight Blocker Bowers. Red, Hot, and Blue: A Smithsonian Salute to the American Musical. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.

Musical Theater Kantor, Michael and Laurence Maslon. Broadway: The American Musical. New York: Bulfinch Press, 2004. Lerner, Alan Jay. The Musical Theatre. New York: McGraw Hill, 1986. Lewis, David H. Broadway Musicals: A Hundred Year History. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2002.

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Outdoor Drama Eszter A. Julian

There is a particular piece of advice that, although still worthwhile, has been repeated so often that it has become a cliche´, to ‘‘write what you know.’’ Wellworn it may be, but this advice appears to have worked for playwright Paul Green, who is widely acknowledged as the originator of modern outdoor drama in the United States. Green wisely followed the counsel of Frederick Koch, his professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, to write what he knew around him, and to make use of the soil beneath his feet. Throughout his long career, Green wrote plays that revolved around the normal, everyday people he knew best. These ‘‘folk dramas’’ are intrinsically linked to Green’s vision of drama as an embodiment of the American democratic ideal, as being of the people, by the people, and for the people. With the vast, sweeping epic outdoor dramas that he created starting in the 1930s, he did, to a certain extent, succeed in creating this democratic drama. In Green and his works lie the beginnings of the unique form that is American outdoor drama, and this essay will attempt to introduce and describe this form to the reader, to examine its distinctiveness, and to peer into its uncertain future.

OUTDOOR DRAMA IN THE UNITED STATES The concept of outdoor drama, of plays enacted in the open air, is not a new one: the Greeks performed dramas in their great stone amphitheater and later, Elizabethan theater companies and their audiences filled spaces such as the Globe Theatre. For all this illustrious past, the history of outdoor drama in the United States is a relatively brief one. Paul Green’s ‘‘symphonic drama’’ The Lost Colony is generally accepted as the first modern outdoor drama, and it

Outdoor Drama opened in 1937 in eastern North Carolina. Today, all sorts of different dramas are performed all over the country. Outdoor historical dramas, based on the facts of the past or on legends, are usually the most common. Shakespeare is also regularly performed outdoors, and there are also religious and passion plays scattered across the country, with plots coming from biblical or other sources. The content of the plays can range from these religious, classical, and historical subjects to plays based on well-known novels or music. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! is performed outdoors at the Discoveryland! Amphitheater in—where else?—Tulsa, Oklahoma during the summer, and Paul Green’s Cross and Sword, based on the early history of Florida, has been declared the official play of that state. As far away as Alaska’s Kodiak Island, the ‘‘sounds of balalaikas, Russian folk music and dancers transport audiences back to the tiny settlement whose traces remain in today’s Kodiak’’ in Frank Brink’s Cry of the Wild Ram, which is set in that state prior to its purchase by the United States from Russia. Mark Sumner, the former head of the Institute of Outdoor Drama has said that ‘‘Spectators. . .attend these presentations [outdoor historical dramas] for many of the same reasons that the ancient classics were attended: for knowledge and empathy for other people and times.’’ He has also emphasized that these dramas are not merely repetitions of history lessons, but are actually creations for the stage based on historical fact or educated conjecture. Many of the plays are performed annually, during the summer months, and many of them fit into the category of Paul Green’s concept of ‘‘symphonic drama.’’ Green coined the term to express his feeling of being a composer, putting together many different instruments and aspects to achieve a harmonious whole. Using all sorts of different theatrical arts, ‘‘motifs must be developed, thematic statements made and exploited, and a ferment of symphonic creativity must be kept brewing to self-realization.’’ Symphonic drama is characterized primarily by its profusion of arts; as Green said regarding the development of the concept, I was having to call upon nearly all the available elements in modern theatrical art. . . Folk song and poetry were needed here. Likewise the dance and pantomime and chorus voices. Even the mental speech of the grisly microphone and echo chamber could be used.. . .Moments. . .would call for masks. And ever there was the dynamic flow and modulation of light to accompany the human behavior at work.. . .And always there was music—music!. . .I found. . .that by the symphonic use of the various elements of the theater, especially music, there came a freedom and fullness of possible story statement not otherwise to be had in dealing with large groups of people in action.

Although the symphonic drama approach comes very close to a pageant, or a series of separate performances based on a single theme, the goal is that all the elements of ‘‘modern theatrical art’’ will combine to produce one unified whole, and the ideas of the drama will be reinforced through dance, song, mime, and

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Western Drama through the Ages other arts. One author, at least, sees in symphonic drama the danger that characters and plot will fade in importance next to the spectacle of the thing. However, Green’s intention was not to produce plays that were merely spectacular, in the sense that a pageant or a circus is spectacular, but rather to create works whose themes were expressed to the audience in more ways than through acting alone. Although the performance of plays in a natural setting is part of a long tradition, American outdoor drama is distinguished from its predecessors to some extent because outdoor drama here has developed into a separate genre. Most outdoor dramas are not simply plays produced outside, but something slightly different. Shakespeare’s plays, for example, are frequently performed outside, as they were in the time of their writer, but they can also be moved indoors without damage to the production. Outdoor drama, on the other hand, cannot be enclosed. It belongs to an entirely separate category of creations that are part play or symphonic drama, part historical spectacle, and part tourist attraction. Across the United States, the one thing that most outdoor dramas share is their very difference from ‘‘indoor drama’’; however, there are other significant differences as well, most of them deriving from the scale and the location of the endeavors. As Sumner put it, ‘‘The aim of outdoor drama is, of course, the aim of all drama, except that, in doing it outdoors, it puts it on a grand scale—the natural setting, the combination of several art forms on the stage—to enhance all the emotions connected to the play.’’ Outdoor drama is more sweeping, more epic in nature, and, out of necessity, many of its elements must be correspondingly larger because of its grander setting. Sumner further said that ‘‘The creation in that big space of the kind of illusion of reality that you must achieve is very difficult because you’re using bigger spaces, more people, and your rehearsals take longer.. . .Most people. . .aren’t trained in the amount of energy that it takes vocally or physically in terms of just moving around the stage and being ‘on’ for that space of time in that big area. It’s more difficult than people think.’’

Acting in Outdoor Drama Actors in outdoor dramas have an entirely different set of considerations than those involved in ‘‘indoor drama.’’ Good projection is essential, as the theater spaces are often very large. Although many outdoor theaters were designed with acoustics in mind, actors must bear in mind that there are few walls and very little, if any, roof, and sound will simply disappear into the air. Outdoor dramas’ actors must also be prepared for long, hot runs, since many of these productions run for most of the summer. While not necessarily longer than runs elsewhere, they do tend to be considerably hotter. Actors have to be able to deal with the humidity, heat, and heavy historical costumes. There are different technical considerations as well: the time and the position of the sunset must be considered when lighting

Outdoor Drama the action, and outdoor dramas often have spectacular special effects that must be carefully controlled. Some outdoor dramas feature animals onstage, such as horses, and there must be people present who can control them. The grandiose, epic nature of outdoor drama is such that all aspects of it must be correspondingly larger.

Production in Outdoor Drama Although the acting and technical considerations involved in outdoor drama are not too far removed from those of indoor drama, the outdoor variety can certainly provide a unique set of challenges. The natural elements can play a capricious role in the production, either enhancing the production or, on occasion, detracting or distracting from it. Author Philip Hill has claimed that the ‘‘opportunity to use the beauties of nature as an element of the dramatic production is one of the real advantages that outdoor drama can offer’’ and Sumner once said that on occasion ‘‘the natural elements get into the act and enhance what you’ve done,’’ but the outdoor setting can also produce difficulties that are far out of the realm of indoor theater. While a beautiful sunset can be more awesome than any painted backdrop, indoor presentations do not usually have to contend with the possibility of, say, having a skunk wander onstage. Such a thing happened during one production of Trumpet in the Land: Sumner relates how the mere sight of the animal caused much of the audience to abandon their seats, and the actors to avoid the part of the stage containing the skunk. Towering clouds and rumblings of thunder can add atmosphere and a sense of doom to productions; however, they also result in ‘‘rain pace,’’ the absurdly fast speed that the actors must assume when inclement weather threatens. Even the night noises of the outdoors, which many take for granted, can become hindrances to the production. Author Mary Nordstrom, in her pictorial guide to American outdoor drama, tells a story regarding Tecumseh! that may discomfit environmentalists: The environmental complications of staging outdoor drama are emphasized by producer-director W.L. (Rusty) Mundell who enjoys recounting the story of how he dealt with the dilemma of noisy tree frogs. Applying his knowledge of natural selectivity and the nocturnal habits of the cacophonic offenders, he solved the problem by stocking the pond in the stage area with sunfish and bass. The sunfish ate the frog eggs and the bass ate the sunfish. Tree frogs no longer drown out the dialogue when the ‘houselights’ go down!

Theaters and Performing Spaces in Outdoor Drama Naturally, outdoor drama also requires a different type of theater. The theaters tend to be quite large, in accordance with the large casts, the dances, and musicians that they must contain, and they often take an amphitheater-like form.

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Western Drama through the Ages Author Philip Hill, in his article on theaters for outdoor drama, goes into considerable detail about the sorts of things that must be taken into account before building: The natural acoustics of the site in question must be reasonably good, and it should be safely removed from the light and noise of highways, towns, athletic areas, or other distractions, while still remaining easily accessible from welltravelled highways. If daytime use of the theater is intended, it should face north, in order to avoid getting direct sunlight in the eyes of either the audience or the actors, but if only night use is contemplated, it should be oriented so the prevailing breeze will blow from the stage to the audience. Hill also discusses such things as acoustics and how to improve them, dressing room space, laundry facilities, considerations when using body makeup, several examples of seat number to parking place ratios, the average amount of sheltered space per seat in a theater, and other considerations that are definitely unique to outdoor drama. Despite the challenges of dealing with tree frogs, skunks, or vast amounts of laundry, the aspect of outdoor drama that most distinguishes it from its indoor counterpart is its site specificity. Many of us are used to indoor theaters in which different plays are presented each season, but with outdoor drama, the same play is presented year after year in the same location. The theaters, often built into the landscape itself or using it as a sort of backdrop, are rather permanent, and are frequently designed and built for particular plays, unlike indoor theaters, which tend to be built for plays in general. The subject matter of outdoor historical dramas, whether it is history or legend, is intrinsically linked to the land in the area, for it is often the very site of the experiences of those figures depicted in the play. Harry Davis, in his essay for the 1957 program of Unto These Hills, emphasized this by writing that ‘‘Another important feature of the historical play is its direct, indigenous relation to the locale in which it is staged. In nearly all instances the dramatized story, rooted in historical fact, is presented on or near the site where the real story took place. This imparts a valuable spiritual quality into the performance, since it becomes a sort of pilgrimage to holy ground.’’ For example, Unto These Hills, a play that takes the history of the Cherokee tribe as its subject, is performed annually on the Cherokee Reservation in western North Carolina. The Lost Colony, which is about the mysterious disappearance of the English settlers from Roanoke, is actually played on Roanoke Island, on the site of the settlers’ disappearance. The plays tend to emphasize this for their audiences; for example, the character of the Historian in The Lost Colony tells the audience that the colonists ‘‘took possession of the Indian village on the north end of Roanoke Island where we are gathered tonight.’’ In an interview, Sumner relates an occasion where the idea was put forward that The Lost Colony ought to be presented at the site of Unto These Hills, and vice versa. It was decided,

Outdoor Drama however, that the proposal was impossible—the cost of altering the theaters to accommodate the play from the opposite end of the state proved to be prohibitive, and the plays lost some significance by not being presented in the location that is the actual location of the play. ‘‘That sense of hallowed ground, that sense of pilgrimage, which is so important to an outdoor historical drama, could not take place’’ in those circumstances.

OUTDOOR DRAMA’S APPEAL It is their relative permanence—along, perhaps, with the fact that they are often produced in the summer, when weather tends to be more cooperative—that combines with their site specificity to give many of these dramas a distinctive status as tourist attractions. As early as 1955, Kermit Hunter, a writer of outdoor dramas, told his readers that ‘‘the real advantages of the outdoor drama are not found at the box office. The return comes from increased tourist trade’’ and this still holds true today. Scott Parker, the current director of the Institute of Outdoor Drama, makes clear that outdoor dramas play a large role as tourist attractions, stating that the plays ‘‘reach for a tourist audience, which means survival and continued community support in areas where their plays could not otherwise exist on a long time basis.’’ Sumner, in saying that ‘‘We have a much broader audience in outdoor drama,’’ also emphasizes the ‘‘tourist audience.’’ Most outdoor historical dramas, in order to remain viable, must continue to attract audiences of all ages—grandparents and grandchildren alike should be able to enjoy the productions. As far as the economic impact of outdoor drama, Parker concurred that it is generally much vaster than that associated with indoor theaters. These dramas, he said, are part of the travel and tourism industry, and attract out-of-state residents who spend money in hotels, restaurants, shops, and the like. Indoor theaters, he said, attract mostly local residents. Of course, there may be some exceptions—perhaps Broadway—but in most places, there is no doubt that this is true. People may travel distances of many miles to see a particular outdoor drama, or their visit may be a part of their travels in a particular state, but rarely would a traveler choose to drive a hundred miles or so just to attend an indoor theater in a particular area. The program for the 2005 season at Snow Camp, North Carolina, also helps clarify how these dramas become, and interact with, tourist attractions. The program tells the reader that some of the main characters from Sword of Peace ‘‘are buried in the old graveyard at Cane Creek meeting just up the road from the amphitheater,’’ thus making the history shown in the play even more tangible. In addition, the brochure for the 2005 season features a map with numbered sites of historic significance that a visitor can examine, all within walking distance of

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Western Drama through the Ages the actual theater. Sumner adds that ‘‘the audience might well the next morning go over to a graveyard where some of the people in the play are actually buried, or they might go to some of the buildings in the town or in the areas where certain things have taken place, and. . .these [are] a big part of the adventure of attending at outdoor historical drama.’’ One can hardly discuss outdoor drama, its past and its future, without mentioning the role played by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). Outdoor drama can be said to have begun there—Paul Green graduated from the university before going on to write Pulitzer Prize-winning dramas as well as The Lost Colony, which is often cited as the first outdoor historical drama. In addition, the Institute of Outdoor Drama is based at UNC-CH. Scott Parker, the current director, writes on the organization’s web site that the Institute was established in 1963 and is ‘‘the only organization in the US providing national leadership in fostering artistic and managerial excellence and expansion of the outdoor drama movement through training, research and advisory programs, and serves as a national clearinghouse for its more that 100 constituent theatre companies across the nation.’’ The influence of UNC-CH can also be seen in the writing of many authors active during the first years of the outdoor drama movement. These authors tend to indicate that the way to go about producing an outdoor drama was to find a play or request one from a playwright, and then write to the University of North Carolina and for assistance and advice from the experienced professionals there. Kermit Hunter, himself a well-known writer of outdoor dramas, wrote in his 1955 article about how to go about establishing an outdoor drama. He declares that the person who has the idea ‘‘usually writes a letter to Paul Green, or Samuel Selden, someone at the University of North Carolina, and in a rather cautious way requests that he be given some information on a ‘pageant’.’’ Green himself wrote that ‘‘Hardly a day passes that I don’t get a letter from some section of the United States asking me to come and write a symphonic drama and help build a theater to stage it in.’’ In the early 1900s, plays were produced in the Forest Theatre, a small outdoor amphitheater on the campus of the university. Though it is smaller than a typical theater for outdoor drama, and was not built for a particular play, as many of those theaters are, it still provided challenges similar to those that outdoor dramatists face today. Because of this, expertise in the field of outdoor drama was already present at the University when the time came to build larger theaters and produce different plays, such as The Lost Colony. Prototypes for today’s outdoor dramas, Parker said, were ‘‘here in Chapel Hill.’’ Green’s first play, Surrender to the Enemy, which he wrote and submitted as part of a contest for original plays, was actually produced at the Forest Theatre on the University of North Carolina campus during his freshman year at the college, 1916–17.

Outdoor Drama

OUTDOOR DRAMA AS ‘‘DEMOCRATIC THEATER’’ As noted it is impossible to discuss outdoor drama in the United States without significant attention to Paul Green, generally given credit as the originator of modern outdoor drama. In addition, his concept of symphonic drama has widely influenced many of the other outdoor dramas in this country. As author Charles Watson put it, ‘‘Green argued that symphonic drama fit the dramatic needs of the American people, but their traditions, exuberant hearts, and even mechanical skill demanded a larger stage than the narrow conventional theater could offer.’’ Watson later seems to suggest that Green achieved this goal; his plays, the author says, ‘‘have brought drama to a large cross-section of society, not merely the customary audience for legitimate theater.’’ Or, as Harry Davis wrote in the 1957 Official Program for Unto These Hills, ‘‘The ‘theatre of the people’—drama in the open air—actually was born almost 3,000 years ago. It had its conception in the great amphitheatres of ancient Greece, was nurtured in the Rome of the Caesars, and came of age during the lusty Elizabethan era of England. And then it died. But now . . .It is being revived through the outdoor historical drama.’’ In a preface that he wrote to The Lost Colony, Green made his ideal of democratic theater clear. The preface takes the form of a dialogue between himself and a theater critic, and when the critic asks him what he means by ‘‘a people’s theatre,’’ the playwright replies in the following manner: ‘‘I mean a theatre in which plays are written, acted, and produced for and by the people—for their enjoyment and enrichment and not for any special monetary profit.’’ His former professor at UNC, Frederick Koch, wrote in the 1938 program for the play that it exemplified ‘‘the most democratic of all the arts. In it all may have a part—poets, players, designers, singers, and dancers.’’ Green also said: This type of drama which I have elected to call symphonic seems to be fitted to the needs and dramatic genius of the American people. Our richness of tradition, our imaginative folk life, our boundless enthusiasm and health, our singing and dancing and poetry, our lifted hearts and active feet and hands, even our multitudinous mechanical and machine means for self-expression—all are too outpouring for the narrow confines of the usual professional and killingly expensive Broadway play and stage. But they can be put to use in the symphonic drama and its theater. It is wide enough, free enough, and among the people cheap enough for their joy and popular use.

Paradoxically, Green found sources for his democratic drama in old Europe, in Alexis Granowsky’s Moscow Jewish Theater and, to some extent, in the work of Bertolt Brecht, in which, according to one author, ‘‘the whole story develops through dance, music, films, commentary, or any other device that jars the viewer into awareness, or that relates the events on the stage to the daily happenings of

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Western Drama through the Ages his life.’’ Watson identifies Green’s plays having the following characteristics, which can be considered Brechtian: ‘‘the progression of scenes is episodic. . .and the dramatic unities are nowhere to be seen.’’ Green also used music extensively, and one might also consider the fact that, since his plays are frequently based in history, the audience already knows what happened and that they therefore will concentrate on why it is happening, perhaps a variation of Brecht’s famous ‘‘alienation effect.’’ One can see further parallels in Watson’s assertion that Green’s outdoor dramas ‘‘champion the ideals of freedom and social reform.’’ Scott Parker, the current head of the Institute of Outdoor Drama , notes that, in the past, people left their houses to seek entertainment such as concerts, theater, film, and other ways of beguiling their time pleasantly, but today’s society is more insulated. With films available to us at the touch of a button on our technologically advanced, high definition televisions, with the internet at our fingertips via computers or cell phones, today we could be connected with the outside world more than ever—yet paradoxically, we insulate ourselves, choosing to be entertained at home rather than leaving the house as we did in the past. The decline of audience members throughout all sorts of art forms is now an accepted fact; the question, of course, is how to solve it. Ironically, Samuel Selden, in his writing in 1952 for the program of Horn in the West, wrote the following about the attraction of outdoor drama: he said that people came flocking to see the plays because of the fundamental urge each of us has to escape the confines of our cramped way of living in a modern world. We work in little rooms; we sleep in little rooms; we eat in little rooms, we play, dance, and even watch the movies with our elbows pinned to our sides. But however civilized we have become, we never feel that this crowding is comfortable and right. Both our bodies and our spirits long for freedom. This freedom, Selden implied, could be found in the experience of attending an epic outdoor drama amidst the beauties of the natural world. His words, though, seem to belong to a different age, one more concerned with manifest destiny and the idea of a frontier people whose love of freedom was overwhelming and formed an integral part of the national character. This desire for the freedom of open spaces, the push to the frontier, is no longer part of the national psyche. Our changing culture is not the only factor affecting outdoor drama today. The dramas themselves—the plays, the staging, perhaps even the technical aspects— have stayed the same for so many years that they have begun, in a way, to stagnate, with the dramas tied too much to the past. The dropping audience attendance, however, cannot be attributed to any one factor. Instead, it is linked to the changing culture we live in, the availability of electronic entertainment, and the shorter attention spans of audiences today, who may not wish to sit through epic historical presentations. Participation in many activities formerly thought of as communal—anything from bowling to concert and theater attendance to

Outdoor Drama golf—is down, and people are buying fewer newspapers as well. Today we are a more insulated society, and can get whatever entertainment we need from the internet or delivered to our mailboxes to play in our homes. One might think that this would drive us out to seek human companionship, but perhaps that time has not yet arrived. Many believe that outdoor theaters will have to reinvent themselves for today’s culture. Change comes slowly to theaters, and the outdoor drama situation may worsen, to the point of forcing some theaters to close, before it gets better. Theaters may have to change to adjust to the taste of the public, including improving details such as professional acting, lighting and scenery, rather than forcing a change in the general public’s taste. Christopher Zink, the Lighting Designer and Technical Director at Catawba College, who has also worked in outdoor drama, considers that spectacle is a key part of outdoor drama, and when people go to see them, they expect to see spectacle as part of the tourist attraction, and ‘‘twirling a fire baton’’ cannot compare with spectacle as seen in productions such as Cirque du Soleil. While he sees that part of the solution is refurbishing the productions themselves, both technically and script-wise, he proposes a solution: that the venues for outdoor dramas be used at other times for events that have a bigger box-office draw—his suggestion was for bluegrass festivals. These money-making events held in the outdoor dramas’ theaters could furnish the funds that the dramas need to continue being produced. In his article on outdoor drama, playwright Kermit Hunter expressed the opinion that outdoor drama is a unique and distinctly American art form; in writing of the audience’s experience, he says, ‘‘Thousands of people have sat there watching and listening to a simple story out of the unending panorama of American history; and they have been deeply moved, because it dealt with timeless values.’’ Outdoor drama has descended from European ancestors via Paul Green to become a uniquely American form. Green saw his symphonic dramas as reflections of the ideals and values of the country as a whole. It would seem that in this time of change, the future of outdoor drama is uncertain. We can only hope that the theaters are able to reinvent themselves and their plays, because it would indeed be unfortunate if this unique form were to disappear forever.

FURTHER READING Adams, Agatha Boyd. Paul Green of Chapel Hill. Edited by Richard Walser. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1951. Free, William J. and Charles B. Lower. History into Drama: A Source Book on Symphonic Drama Including the Complete Text of Paul Green’s The Lost Colony. New York: Odyssey Press, 1963. Green, Paul. ‘‘Symphonic Drama.’’ College English. Vol. 10, no. 7 (April 1949): 359–65.

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Western Drama through the Ages Hill, Philip G. ‘‘A Theatre for the Outdoor Historical Drama.’’ Educational Theatre Journal. Vol. 14, no. 4 (December 1962): 312–17. Hunter, Kermit. ‘‘The Theatre Meets the People.’’ Educational Theatre Journal. Vol. 7, no. 2 (May 1955): 128–35. Institute of Outdoor Drama. Web site of the Institute, located at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: http://www.unc.edu/depts/outdoor/index.html. Kenny, Vincent S. Paul Green. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1971. Nordstrom, Mary. Outdoor Drama: Pictorial Guide to Over Fifty Annual Productions in the United States. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: North South Artscope Publications, 1985. Parker, Scott. ‘‘Outdoor Dramas Expand Across the Country.’’ Institute of Outdoor Drama. (http://www.unc.edu/depts/outdoor/scottarticle.html). Accessed May 22, 2006. Sumner, Mark. ‘‘Mark Sumner: Reflections on Rise of Outdoor Historical Dramas.’’ Southern Theatre Summer 1990, pp. 6–15, 20. Watson, Charles S. The History of Southern Drama. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

PART V

Dramatic Genres and Styles


Dada in Drama Sarah Bay-Cheng

‘‘What is dada? An art? A philosophy? Politics? Fire insurance? Or: the state religion? Is dada actual energy? Or is it absolutely nothing?’’

These questions, included in an unpublished anthology of Dada literature in 1920, appear at first to explain Dada, but then they confuse. What is Dada? The answers listed here are nonsense. How can something be described as an art, a philosophy, and fire insurance? The more one reads about Dada, the more distant the definition. Significantly, the questions posed here were never answered by artists in Dada. Nor were they meant to be. One of the distinguishing characteristics of Dada, unique among artistic and cultural movements of the twentieth century, is its passionate insistence that it never become an artistic, cultural, or political movement. Unlike its successor surrealism, Dada never wanted to be consistent in anything except its inconsistency. Dada aspired to uncertainty, confusion, and anti-establishment ideals. To define Dada was to misrepresent it. Often described by its adherents as ‘‘anti-art,’’ Dada attempted to become a movement that was against all movements, to create works of art that privileged the process of creation more than the art object itself, and to break down existing ideas about art and life. In short, the purpose of Dada was to confuse, anger, and incite its audience into a new way of looking at the modern world. One of the seminal instances of this challenge was the famous presentation of Marcel Duchamp’s sculpture, ‘‘Fountain’’ (1917), to the American Society of Independent Artists. Signed only ‘‘R. Mutt,’’ the object—more commonly recognizable as a common urinal—immediately caused an uproar. Described as obscene and outrageous, the ‘‘Fountain’’ was banned from the exhibition and prompted an outcry in the art world, even among those who considered themselves avant-garde.

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Western Drama through the Ages This was almost certainly Duchamp’s intention. As a member of the Independent Artists, Duchamp well knew the conventions surrounding art, particularly its presence in galleries and exhibitions and audiences’ receptions of modern art. Only a few years earlier, an American critic labeled Duchamp’s cubist painting ‘‘Nude Descending a Staircase’’ (1912) ‘‘an explosion in a shingle factory.’’ In the years before the Independent Artists show in New York, Duchamp pursued a type of sculpture he called ‘‘readymade.’’ Duchamp collected objects such as bicycle wheels and bottle racks on the street or in stores and, without altering the object, presented them as art. Rather than craft something himself, Duchamp found the sculptures already made, hence the term ‘‘readymade.’’ With the ‘‘Fountain,’’ Duchamp did not alter the art object/urinal other than to turn it on its side and sign a fictitious name. By placing an object of common (and, to some, vulgar) use in the sphere of public viewing, Duchamp deliberately challenged prevailing opinions of art. There is little aesthetic in the presentation of a urinal; the object itself evokes a more functional context, bringing to mind public restrooms and urination in place of considerations of beauty. Moreover, the lack of effort (this was not marble or clay carved into the image of a urinal, but merely a piece of plumbing purchased from a supply store) was roundly denounced by the artistic community of New York. For the purposes of Dada, especially its thwarted public performance (the urinal was excluded from the public exhibition), both Duchamp’s ‘‘Fountain’’ and its reception highlight the key elements of Dada art and performance: namely, the challenging of established conventions and social mores; the revealing (and reveling) of things of daily life commonly thought improper, dirty, or even obscene; and the belief that the best way to affect an audience was by direct, immediate confrontation. This last aspect of Dada would prove especially important to experimental performance throughout Europe in the years between two World Wars. While poetry and painting captured the confusions and horrors of modern life through abstraction and randomness in painting and sculpture, it was through live performance and film that Dada affected its audience with the immediacy and impact it most desired.

BEGINNINGS OF DADA Given the centrality of the audience and the assault of public propriety, it should come as no surprise that Dada itself began as theatrical performance. In 1916, two young and ambitious theater artists, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, fled to Zurich from Germany to escape World War I. Both Ball and Hennings had worked in theaters in Germany and Austria, and they met while Hennings was performing in the Cabaret Simplizissimus in Munich, 1913. While in Germany, Ball apprenticed alongside the famous German expressionist

Dada in Drama director Max Reinhardt, and worked as the dramaturg for the Kammerspiele (‘‘intimate’’ or ‘‘little’’ theater) in Munich in 1915. As a performer, Hennings embodied the energy and aesthetic of many Dada performances to come. In 1912, the journal Die Aktion (Action) published the following account of Hennings performance: She stepped onto the cabaret stage her face waxen, ribboned about the neck, with her cropped yellow hair and stiffly layered ruffles of her skimpy, dark velvet dress, she was separated from humanity . . .Emmy Hennings, very made-up, hypnotized by Morphine, Absinthe and the bloodly flame of the electric ‘‘Gloire’’ torn in extremist distortion of the Gothic, her voice hops across the corpses and will mock them, soulfully trilling like a yellow canary.

Unlike most popular cabaret of the period, Hennings rejection of beauty, even her humanity, reflected an important shift in the artistic values that would became Dada theater. In this early performance, many of the guiding principles of Dada were established. Like many Dada artists to follow, Hennings used sexuality in her performances to make her audience uncomfortable and to test the limits of public performance. By distorting her physical body, she distanced herself from a character, and her exaggerated sexuality undermined the usual femininity of cabaret performances. Her appearance as a corpse similarly predicted Dada’s future directions; her combination of sex and death foreshadowed its frequent juxtapositions in both Dada and surrealist performances. Georg Grosz, for example, created a character known as ‘‘Dadadeath,’’ and skulls and macabre attire became common images of Dada in the years after World War I. Indeed, the war itself served as an important touchstone for European artists as they struggled to create in the wake of the world’s first mechanized war. In his ruminations about theater of the early twentieth century, Ball considered macabre performances as accurate, even necessary, reflections of the coming age. As he wrote in his published journal, Flight out of Time (written 1916, published 1927): The image of the human form is gradually disappearing from the painting of these times and all objects appear only in fragments. This is one more proof of how ugly and worn the human countenance has become, and of how all the objects of our environment have become repulsive to us.

Written in the midst of World War I, Ball’s assessment of war-ravaged Europe and the impact on artistic representation directly translated into the performance of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland. Fleeing Germany in 1916, Ball and Hennings arrived in Zurich, a refuge for many artists escaping World War I. Since the war began, Ball had become obsessed with a new kind of performance. Although declared unfit for military service, Ball witnessed for himself the horrors of the world’s first mechanized

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Western Drama through the Ages war. In November 1914, Ball travelled to Belgium, where he directly observed soldiers on the front lines. Shocked by the brutality of the war, Ball wrote soon after, ‘‘Theatre has no sense any more. Who wants to act now, or even see acting?. . .I feel about the theatre as a man must feel who has suddenly been decapitated.’’ But this did not quench his desire for performance. Inspired by the Italian futurist manifestoes, which proclaimed the beauty of machines, fragmentation, and the virtues of simultaneous action, Ball and Hennings began openly soliciting for artists to join them in their new performance venture, the Cabaret Voltaire. Named for the hedonist French writer and philosopher, the Cabaret at first presented experimental readings of poetry and exhibitions of art. Music soon became an important part of the Cabaret, including Ball’s own sound poems, Richard Huelsenbeck’s drumming, and noise. Through its often wild antics and openness to new forms of art, the Cabaret attracted a core group of artists, poets, painters, and playwrights—including the writer Tristan Tzara, and the painters Marcel Janco and Hans Arp—and a rowdy group of spectators. As Arp explained one performance: ‘‘Total pandemonium. The people around us are shouting, laughing, and gesticulating. Our replies of love, volleys of hiccups, poems, moos, and miaowing of medieval Bruitists.’’ Bruitism, or noise-music, was introduced by futurist F. T. Marinetti and like Marinetti’s theories of simultaneity and mechanized performance, Bruitism became an important part of the Dada aesthetic. Described by one member of Dada as ‘‘a chorus of typewriters, kettledrums, rattles, and saucepan lids,’’ Bruitism made loud, confrontational music with objects of everyday life, integrating the material of living into art. Audiences of the Cabaret reveled in the chaotic performances, yelling, cheering, and often participating directly on the tiny stage. Such integration of life and art played a vital role in the wake of the war waging across Europe. The first mechanized war, World War I introduced the world to the power of the automatic machine gun, grenades, and bombs dropped from airplanes. Trench warfare, including gas and chemical weapons, scarred Europe’s hillsides. In light of such atrocities as chemical warfare, Dada artists began to rethink the purpose of art. In a world in which the human body could be quickly and efficiently torn to bits, in which the machines of war could destroy vast tracts of land, and in which people could so easily be turned into unwitting machines of death and destruction, what place did the old values of beauty and truth have in the new century? Dada, then, attempted to confront and attack the institutions that made such dehumanization of the soldier possible. While not always explicitly political, Ball and other Dadaists wanted to tear down the society that supported and encouraged the war. By 1917, the Cabaret reflected Ball’s belief that the purpose of art was to reject the conventions of the present age, to drown out the boom of wartime cannons with the crash of Dada’s big drum.

Dada in Drama As the war drew to an end, however, this expressly political purpose gradually evolved into a more artistic enterprise. Indeed, Dada quickly became antipolitics, attacking all belief systems, including pacifism. As Tzara wrote in his ‘‘Dada manifesto, 1918,’’ ‘‘Every product of disgust that is capable of becoming a negation of the family is dada; protest with the fists of one’s whole being in destructive action: DADA . . .’’Over time, Dada’s performances began to reflect the aesthetic impulses of the young Rumanian writer Tzara, rather than the political and activist ambitions of Hugo Ball. Tzara’s aesthetic vision specifically involved destruction. Boxing and smashing windowpanes became features of its performance. Police were regularly called to calm violent outbursts. But even as Dada attacked society, artists also began more widely to publish poems and plays. Tzara began writing Dada plays both for performance and as literature. His first, ‘‘The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine’’ (1916), appeared in the anthology Collection Dada. Richard Huelsenbeck, best known as ‘‘Dada’s drummer,’’ published his sound poetry, and in January 1917, the first public Dada exhibition of art opened at the Galerie Corray, including painting and literary work by Arp, Janco, Adya Van Rees, and Hans Richter. Performance in the Galerie also flourished. Dancer Sophie Taeuber, who had worked with Rudolph von Laban, performed her ‘‘Song of the Flying-fish and Seahorses’’ at the gallery, and other performances included masks, elaborate costumes, and riotous audiences. Such performances, though inspired by the activist impulses of the Cabaret Voltaire, evolved in new, more self-consciously theatrical directions that were simultaneously destructive and life-affirming. ‘‘Anti-art’’ would destroy the old, withered conventions in order to let the new art emerge. As painter and filmmaker Hans Richter remembers, ‘‘I assumed . . .that the name Dada, applied to our movement, had some connection with the joyous Slavonic affirmation, ‘da da’ [‘yes, yes’ in Rumanian and Russian]—and to me this seemed wholly appropriate. Nothing could better express our optimism, ours sensation of newly won freedom, than this powerfully reiterated ‘da, da’—‘yes, yes’ to life.’’ In its constant attack on convention, Dada in Zurich eventually fell to its own internal divisions. As the poet Tzara focused on the literary and artistic aspirations of Dada and manifestoes, Ball felt increasingly alienated. Only a year after the opening of Cabaret Voltaire, original founders Ball and Hennings left for the Alps, and Huelsenbeck returned to Germany, calling the new Galerie Dada a ‘‘self-conscious little art business, characterized by tea-drinking old ladies trying to revive their vanishing sexual powers with the help of ‘something mad.’’’ Dada followed Huelsenbeck to Berlin, where Expressionist poets Max HerrmannNeisse and Theodor Da¨ubler and painter George Grosz enthusiastically joined Dada. The first Dada performance in Berlin featured Huelsenbeck wildly beating his cane around the room and Grosz chanting his poetry: ‘‘You-sons-of-bitches, materialists/bread-eaters, flesh=eaters=vegetarians!!/professors, butchers’

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Western Drama through the Ages apprentices, pimps!/you bums!’’ Grosz completed his performance, perhaps thinking of Duchamp, by urinating on an Expressionist painting. During this time, performance leaked out of the cabarets and galleries where Dada had previously flourished, and began working among the people on the streets. Artists like Grosz dressed in costume and paraded down the streets of Berlin. Raoul Hausmann and his wife, the artist Hannah Ho¨ ch, joined in costumed performances, while posters throughout the city proclaimed, ‘‘Dada kicks you in the behind and you like it!’’ Word of the Dada insanity (indeed, one member, Johannes Baader was declared legally insane) spread outside the city, and subsequently spectators flocked to witness the ‘‘Dada Rebellion.’’ As in Zurich, the role of simultaneous action flourished. Dada performance rejected a linear progression of events, or coherent plot. Dada instead embraced spontaneous action, illogical language, and artists performing without purpose or clear intent. If the modern world seemed to operate according to rules of cruel chance, so too would Dada create a theater that embraced spontaneity, random events, and destruction of old ideals. For example, Grosz sponsored a ‘‘Pan-Germanic Poetry Contest,’’ during which twelve poets read their work simultaneously in a kind of race. This race undermined the value of literature—no one could hear the poems being read—while simultaneously articulating the futility of poetry. Poets were no longer solitary individuals, but rather interchangeable machines with pre-programmed emotions. Audiences could no longer concentrate on the work of art, but rather had to fight through a me´lange of aggressive sound.

DADA PERFORMANCE IN GERMANY Dada adapted this style of performance from the theories of collage (from visual art) and montage (borrowed from film). The layering of action and the repetitions of action became key elements of German Dada. Whereas the Italian influence of futurism had most strongly influenced the performances of Hugo Ball, German performance followed the visual aesthetic of photomontage. Artists such as John Heartfield and Hannah Ho¨ch produced work that cut and pasted existing images together, forcing new perspectives and new meanings among the images. Just as Duchamp changed the meaning of a common urinal simply by placing it in an art exhibition, German Dadaists attempted to transform the images of daily life—advertising, newspaper articles, posters, magazines—into art that would reflect the impulses and ambitions of modern life, particularly in postwar Germany. Found images placed in radical juxtaposition to one another quickly translated into performances that included existing text, repetition, and a blurring between life and art. Like its Zurich predecessor, German Dada performance borrowed the techniques of the futurists—simultaneity, machines—but placed new emphasis on performances with objects. Words became relatively unimportant as machines deliberately obscured human voices. Indeed, many of the paintings

Dada in Drama and collages from German Dada combine the human form with machines, often replacing limbs, mouths, and heads with prosthetic devices. This representation of humans as biomechanical beings dictated much of Berlin performance. For example, in 1920, Grosz and others presented the First Dada Fair. In attendance was the American journalist Ben Hecht (who later wrote the play The Front Page [1928]). In his report on the event, Hecht revealed the importance of machines, chaos, and the aggressive interactions between performers and audience. Hecht described a race between a girl at a sewing machine and a girl at a typewriter. There was a race among eleven poets for a prize. All eleven poets recited their poems at the top of their voices and then with the shot of a starter’s pistol, stopped. Grosz, appearing in blackface, danced and yelled throughout the performance. Hecht remembered Grosz yelling ‘‘Take your foot out of the butter before it is too late.’’ In its absurdity and incomprehensible language and action, Dadafest created a different standard of performance. No ‘‘plays’’ would be written for the stage. There was no dialogue or poetry to remember or recite. No characters appear in these performances. Chaos, non-linearity, and randomness dominate the event. These performances actively engaged spectators in the event. The performers implicated the audience in the performance itself, often arousing spectators to anger, disgust, and sometimes violence. Hecht noted in his report that such violence marked the conclusion of the Dada festival: Finally, the audience started its counterrevolution. Officers drew guns and fired at the stage. Police and soldiery appeared. High officers demanded the arrest of the hooligans who had swindled and mocked Berlin’s elite. But there was no one to arrest. The Dadaists had melted into the spring night.

Hecht described a perfect end to a Dada performance. The performance succeeds when it offend the sensibilities of the audience, and sufficiently antagonizes the instruments of the state, i.e., the police and soldiers. Most importantly, the Dadaists get away. In the midst of the postwar German Weimar Republic, the chaotic, aggressive, and sometimes violent Dada performances reflected the political instability of the time. During the Republic (1919–33), there were more than 30 competing political parties, widespread inflation, a rise in prostitution and sexually transmitted diseases, and scores of war veterans, many of whom were amputees and many more who were psychologically scarred by war. It should come as no surprise that the instability of Dada should have taken hold so powerfully in a city itself so unstable. But despite this compatibility, Berlin Dada was relatively short-lived. By the First Dada Fair in 1920, the movement seemed almost exhausted. Huelsenbeck again moved, this time to Hanover; others like playwright Walter Mehring joined what was called literary Dada. Literary Dada largely eschewed public performance, concentrating its efforts on publication. As the Weimar Republic continued, moving ever closer to Hitler’s rise in 1933, artists like Grosz became

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Western Drama through the Ages increasingly politicized, and eventually left Dada performance in favor of more explicitly activist theaters like the Proletarian Theatre of director Erwin Piscator. It is important, however, to remember that Dada defied the usual progression of an artistic movement. Although Dada’s original artists moved frequently in the years after World War I, Dada often appeared independently of its founding members. Kurt Schwitters, for example, formed his own version of Dada even though he was rejected for recognized membership in Dada. Despite his formal rejection, Schwitters made many sculptures and performances in keeping with the spirit of Dada, and he clearly looked to other Dada artists for inspiration. For example, Schwitters based his ‘‘Ursonate’’ (1922)—an atonal, repetition of non-verbal sounds—on Raoul Hausmann’s sound poetry. A typical excerpt of ‘‘Ursonate’’ reads as follows: Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, dll rrrrrr beeee bo¨, dll rrrrrr beeee bo¨ fu¨mms bo¨, dll rrrrrr beeee bo¨ fu¨mms bo¨ wo¨, beeee bo¨ fu¨mms bo¨ wo¨ ta¨a¨, bo¨ fu¨mms bo¨ wo¨ ta¨a¨ za¨a¨, fu¨mms bo¨ wo¨ ta¨a¨ za¨a¨ Uu:

In keeping with the randomness espoused by Dada artists like Arp, Schwitters formed his own kind of art, ‘‘Merz.’’ The word ‘‘merz’’ is the second half of the German word ‘‘Commerz’’ or commerce, which Schwitter found on a scrap of paper in the trash. Under this rubric, Schwitters created merz-paintings, merz-columns— towering structures of vertical sculpture—and merz-theater. In his ‘‘To All the Theatres of the World I Demand the Merz Stage,’’ Schwitters argued that all objects should share equally in performance, both humans and mechanical devices alike. Other artists left Berlin for Cologne, where Max Ernst, Arp, and Theodor Baargeld created a ‘‘Dada-Demonstration.’’ Spectators entered the exhibition through the bathroom of a bar, in which they discovered Baargeld’s ‘‘Fluid Skeptic,’’ a large aquarium filled with blood-colored water, an alarm clock, a woman’s wig, and a wooden arm. Spectators were invited to destroy the art with a hammer, although it was the police who eventually closed the exhibition. Even with these developments outside of Berlin, German Dada soon ended. Though Dada spread quickly in the five years since its inception in 1916, most artists soon reconvened in the new center of Dada, Paris.

DADA IN FRANCE: PERFORMANCE, LITERATURE, AND ART Although Dada, especially in performance, had a vigorous life before Paris, it is still widely associated with Parisian culture of the 1920s. Most significantly,

Dada in Drama Paris Dada created many more documents of performance than in either Zurich or Berlin. By the time Tzara arrived in Paris in 1920, the energy of Dada (lead prominently by Tzara himself) focused on plays, manifestoes, and films, as well as live performances. Paris was also an active center for avant-garde art, particularly theater. Tzara and the other Dadaists who migrated to Paris were met with unusually fertile ground for a theatrical avant-garde. Nearly 25 years earlier Alfred Jarry’s famous play Ubu Roi (1896) premiered at the The´aˆtre de l’Ouevre. This play, arguably the first avant-garde drama, shocked and offended its audience from the moment of its opening line. Jarry’s satire of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, opens with a single word, ‘‘Merrrde!’’ Roughly translated as ‘‘Shiterrrrr!’’ the opening remark allegedly caused riots in the theater. William Butler Yeats, who saw the play in 1896, forlornly responded, ‘‘After us, the savage gods.’’ Since Jarry’s great attack on art, convention, and decency, the Parisian avant-garde continued to thrive, and it was this environment that welcomed Tzara in 1920. Though Tzara arrived in Paris alone, a group of young writers anxiously awaited the arrival of their ‘‘messiah.’’ The young writers who jointly published the magazine Litte´rature discovered Tzara in the midst of their attempt to radically reform and reshape French culture. The young editors, Andre´ Breton, Philippe Soupault, and Louis Aragon, were soon joined by Paul Eluard and Roger Vitrac, a poet who would become Dada’s most prominent dramatist. Hans Richter recalls the period of Dada in Paris as ‘‘the renewal of language,’’ and certainly the amount of drama written during this time greatly outnumbers those in Dada’s previous incarnations. Breton, for example, explicitly followed the example of Jean-Pierre Brisset, who compared language with divine consciousness. Breton wrote of Brisset that, ‘‘The Word, which is God, has preserved within its folds the history of the human race.’’ Even before Dada formally arrived with Tzara in 1920, Paris was rife with avant-garde literature and drama. Guillaume Apollinaire published his ‘‘sur-realist’’ play, The Breasts of Tiresias in 1917, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes wrote his Dada-influenced play, The Mute Canary in 1919. Modernist and avant-garde literary figures, including James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others flocked to Paris’ left bank, creating an environment of creative experiment that never has been duplicated. But Paris was by no means exclusively literary. Painters and photographers filled the city, including Picasso, Joan Miro´ , Georges Braque, and Man Ray, among many others. Nor was performance diminished by the presence of literature. Not only live performance, but also films proliferated throughout Paris Dada. Often, both live performances and films were combined in theatrical events. For example, Man Ray’s Return to Reason (1923) was created at Tzara’s request for the Dada production, Evening of the Bearded Heart (1923). Produced very quickly, Ray’s film was more or less an extended motion picture version of his ‘‘rayographs.’’ Man Ray created his rayographs by covering unexposed film, then

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Western Drama through the Ages exposing the film to light. Asked by Tzara only a day before the soiree, Ray had little time to complete a film. Unable to shoot a complete film, the photographer simply repeated his photographic technique on motion picture film strips. Although the film includes some camera-shot images, Man Ray created much of Return to Reason by covering unexposed film with objects, such as salt and nails, and then exposing the film to light. The developed images create haunting combinations of light and dark that when set in motion, create visual frenzies of black and white images. Despite their originality, Ray’s film images were not the most startling aspects of the ‘‘bearded heart.’’ Tzara’s play The Gas Heart (1920) became the source of a violent confrontation. The text itself follows Tzara’s stated aim that Dada should destroy the theater as it existed. Consequently, the text removes many of the markers of the usual play; there are no characters, little plot, and the dialogue is almost entirely nonsensical. The play features characters from a face: nose, eye, mouth, ear, neck, and eyebrow. As critic Robert A. Varisco describes it, ‘‘When Tzara removed personalities and names, real characters from the stage, he undermined the expectations of every viewer; a veritable bomb was thrown into the seats of the audience.’’ Such a bomb not only struck the audience, but also other Dadaists in attendance. Breton and Benjamin Pe´ret yelled loudly at the performers and even rushed the stage to attack them. As Georges Hugnet remembers, ‘‘When the time came for the performance of Le couer a` gaz [The Gas Heart], the actors . . .were suddenly interrupted by violent protests from the stalls. Then an unexpected interlude: Breton hoisted himself on to the stage and started to belabour the actors.’’ Eventually, the theater descended into chaos: members of the audience attacked the stage. The poet Paul E´luard was crushed under the weight of several people, breaking footlamps under him. Police were called and some actors left with broken limbs. The break within Dada was unmistakable. As Breton wrote after the soire´e, ‘‘Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears.’’ Dada was dying, but not yet gone. Though many cite the evening of the bearded heart as Dada’s last event, one more performance would include its techniques, if not its name. In a final and stunning conclusion, this anarchic and chaotic style of performance burned out in a now-infamous final performance. Although Francis Picabia had formally rejected Dada, his performance Relaˆche in 1924 still incorporated many elements of Dada, and many of the artists who had made Dada notable around the world. Literally translated as ‘‘no performance,’’ Relaˆche was conceived by Picabia, with music by Erik Satie and included the film Entr’acte, written by Picabia and filmed by Rene Clair. The live performance featured the simultaneity that the Dadaists had appropriated so effectively from the futurists. The performance opened with photographer Man Ray measuring the floor with his feet. At the same time, a fireman poured water from one

Dada in Drama bucket to another, while smoking cigarettes, one after another. Members of the Swedish Ballet walked on stage and stripped off their tuxedos. In the confrontational style of Dada, spotlights were shone directly into the eyes of the audience. The intermission was the aptly named film, Entr’acte. Deliberately nonlinear and nonsensical, the film follows a runaway coffin from a funeral procession, a male dancer in a skirt (shot almost entirely from directly below through glass), and Man Ray and Duchamp playing chess on the roof of the theater in which the performance appeared. Duchamp also appeared in person, posing as a nearly naked Adam (with a well-placed fig leaf) next to a naked Eve. Dancers danced in macabre pairs, while banners announced that ‘‘[Erik] Satie is the greatest musician in the world.’’ In his assessment, painter Fernand Le´ger announced that the performance succeeded in its aim ‘‘to bring the stage to life. All prejudices come crashing down.’’ Well, perhaps not all prejudices. Predictably (if anything in Dada can be called predictable), the evening ended in chaos. The final curtain call featured the creators driving around the stage in a miniature car, while the audience jeered and hissed. Though not as overtly violent as the bearded heart, Relaˆche was nevertheless destructive. Rolf de Mare´ described the performance as the end of his Swedish ballet company: ‘‘it was impossible for us to go forward, to remain on the path that opened in front of us, and equally impossible to turn back. Up to now we had felt the breath of modern life and translated it into dances; but now we had reached the point at which its downward slope was anathema to us.’’

DADA’S INFLUENCE By now, Dada had more or less fully collapsed. Artists like Breton, Aragon, and Soupault busily transformed their interest in the unconscious mind and Freud’s theory into surrealism. The plays and films after 1924 differed significantly from those of early Dada. Dream imagery, sexual fantasy, and manipulations of language replaced the playful randomness of Dada and its abstractions. In many ways, the end of Dada was the most fitting confirmation of Dada. Unlike its successor surrealism, Dada defied all rules and classifications. As J.E. Blosche predicted in his Dada Prophesy (1919), ‘‘Dada will survive only by ceasing to exist.’’ The movement that refused to become a movement could only live up to its promise by destroying itself. Once artists reached the limits of their spontaneity and surprise, the movement came to a halt. Or, as Kurt Schwitters wrote in 1922, ‘‘Perhaps you will understand better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions.’’ Dada successfully faded before it could become a convention of its own. But it was not without a legacy. By seeping into

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Western Drama through the Ages the places without reason, Dada launched surrealism, and many other art movements to follow, including Happenings, Pop Art, and punk rock. Both violent and playful, destructive and life-affirming, Dada was a unique movement in twentieth century performance, one which reflected the violence of World War I, but refused to cower in the face of it. Dada is dead, long live Dada.

FURTHER READING Bay-Cheng, Sarah. Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant Garde Theatre. New York: Routledge, 2005. Dant, Tim. Critical Social Theory: Culture, Society and Critique. London: Sage Publications Ltd., 2004. Worthen, W.B. Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.


Dramatic Comedy Miriam M. Chirico

DEFINITIONS Contrary to popular belief, it is complications, and not laughter, that acts as the defining attribute of comedy. If the audience finds itself delighting in confusion and plot twist, then they have entered the realm of comedy. Admittedly, playwrights and actor have always sought to amuse and entertain; moving an audience to laughter has always been a central goal of comedy. But while the events of the comedy inevitably elicit laughter, the series of misadventures and the characters’ ability to fix these blunders is what defines the genre. Characters twist and turn through a series of misunderstandings and mishaps, often compounding their errors before reaching solutions that have been obvious to the spectator all along. Nor can we permit the quintessential ‘‘happy ending’’ to serve as the defining quality, although comedies do, for the most part, end happily. Long-lost relatives are found, a treasure is rewarded, and planned executions are reversed by thirteenth-hour reprieves. Rather it is the attitude of the characters toward their circumstances that indicates to us when we are in the realm of comedy. One must observe how the characters view their predicament and how they plan to go about solving their plight. If the characters seem optimistic and believe they can find a solution to their current troubles, a spirit of comedy is at work. One also detects an attitude of resilience: if we sense that good fortune dallies around the corner, even while the situation appears dire, then comedy reigns. Thus it is the abundance of complications, obstacles, and dilemmas as well as an overall spirit of optimism that qualifies a play as ‘‘comedic.’’ As we shall see, comedies exist in various forms, but all share a sense of flexibility and tempered optimism.

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Western Drama through the Ages The wilder the playwright can make the complications and the closer the characters come to the point of fatality, the better, just as long as the events are resolved before the play is over. The future for the characters may seem bleak; they may be at the point of demise; yet some fortunate coincidence occurs or someone arrives who holds the key to the puzzle and the plot’s knotty problems unravel themselves smoothly. In fact, the events of comedies may veer dangerously close to the point of tragedy in order to increase the hilarity and develop the suspense. Masterful comic plotting comes from the playwright’s ability to stretch out a succession of interconnected events, each one raising the stakes of discovery and danger until it seems no rescue is likely. Then, some earlier detail disregarded as insignificant turns out to save the day, and we admire the imbroglio that entertained us for so long. As scholar and critic Northrop Frye notes, ‘‘Happy endings do not impress us as true, but as desirable, and they are brought about by manipulation.’’ While a realist might find the forced happy ending deceptive in its lack of correspondence to real life, not all art must be an imitation of life. Comedy may instead provide an image of an ideal world that one could imagine and perhaps work toward. Comedy may actually serve our intelligence in ways that tragedy does not, by providing jigsaw puzzles of possibilities that the mind creatively engineers into new scenarios until the missing piece clicks finally into place with a satisfactory snap. While the majority of comedies end happily, some comedies, notably Beckettian and Chekhovian dramas, do not offer a cheery finale. In order to expand our definition of comedy to be more inclusive of diverse forms, we must instead look for the spirit of resiliency that the characters possess in the face of all odds. The philosopher Susan Langer perceives the rhythms behind comedy as corresponding to the biological rhythms that pulse beneath the surface of all living things. As forms grow, adapt to new environments, and work to preserve their lives, they manifest an energy that can best be described as the ‘‘life force.’’ A lizard that loses his tail will instinctively grow a new one, while a tree crowded out by others will remain long and thin until it can reach the tree cover and spread its leaves. And roots kept in a dark cellar will invariably find the one chink of light towards which to grow. This instinctual, biological drive towards righting a problem is the same impulse found in comedy—the belief that any obstacle can be surmounted, any predicament resolved. The Plautine character Pseudolus, when formulating a scheme to rescue his master’s girlfriend, optimistically tells the audience: ‘‘I can’t see how I’m going to do it,—but, if there’s one thing I can see, it’s that I will do it.’’ While tragic characters may likewise hunt for solutions, they do so with a spirit of resignation, a belief that larger forces are at work dominating their actions: ‘‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will,’’ Hamlet says, realizing that events must run their course, while Lear bemoans ‘‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.’’

Dramatic Comedy These tragic characters feel controlled by their circumstances. Not so for the comic characters who feel energized by the challenge to turn fate to their own advantage. Langer shows us how comedy reifies the ‘‘life feeling’’—the biological impulse, the pure sense of living, when she states, ‘‘the feeling of comedy is the feeling of heightened vitality, challenged wit and will, engaged in the great game with Chance.’’ In fact, the comic character rarely considers himself fated and speaks more often of fortune than fate. Comedy is not governed by the sense of doom that fate implies—the uneasy sensation that the gods have predetermined one’s outcome. Rather comedy operates under another goddess, a kind of ebullient spin-thewheel force whose philosophy consists of a longer view, an awareness that even though one is hard on one’s luck, that luck can always change, and what goes down must come up again. While Aristotle defined tragedy as a reversal of events that occurs when those who are placed high are brought low, he might have additionally suggested that comedy follows a series of events from high to low to high again; the trick for the playwright is to end the play when the wheel of fortune hits the zenith and the character stands on top. Part of what creates the complications in many classical comedies is the institution of an irrevocable law at the onset of the play. An authority figure puts into place a forbidding and inflexible rule, a limit condition that makes life difficult for certain characters. In Roman writer Terence’s play, The Mother-in-Law (Hecyra) the father pressures his son into settling down with the proper woman for his social class, rather than continue to date his beloved prostitute. Similarly the father in A Midsummer Night’s Dream designates which man his daughter must marry and threatens her with death should she refuse. Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro (1775) has the ‘‘droit de seigneur’’ as its opening premise— the legendary right that a nobleman had to have sexual intercourse with a female servant of the household on the night of her wedding. And the Count Carlo Gozzi begins his fairy-tale-like comedy The Love of the Three Oranges (1761) with a curse placed upon a Prince that must be undone or else he will die. The actions of all of these comedies requires that the characters either break the law or try to outsmart the authorial figures that established these constraints. We side with the wily underdog or the spirited rebel who envisions a new way of doing things, a new order. We laugh as they plot to outwit the stern group of law-abiding elders and we relish their recklessness because it appeals to our own. However, the action of many other comedies only begins the moment the restraint is removed, thus enabling a more licentious, playful period to begin. In Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1677), it is the departure of her father that allows the heroine and her friends the freedom to join the Carnival festivities in Naples and find themselves lovers. Likewise, by spreading the rumor that he is impotent, Horner, a known London libertine in The Country Wife (1675), is provided with

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Western Drama through the Ages free access to many married women in London, because he has removed the stricture of surveillance with which many husbands’ previously regarded him. Comedies thrive on laws and breaking the laws: laws that impede the desires of the characters or laws that guard the characters from becoming victims to their own desires. The rules and constraints surrounding these characters delineate notions of civility and orderliness; these rules tell us much about our society and ourselves. Comedy, with its back-and-forth trespassing between civilized and animalistic behavior, between cultivated responses and instinctual, between the urban area and the rural retreat, reveals both the confining nature of laws as well as their functional safeguard from the chaos within. It is through these very conflicts in comedy where laws are flouted and broken, that one gains a clearer vision of the boundaries that structure and organize our communal networks. Governments establish laws to shape and define a community and by testing these boundaries one discovers the limits and mores of the people residing there. We need only examine Constitutional debates about prayer in school or burning the flag to understand the value systems at play within the United States. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1604), several lovers leave the town and escape into an enchanted forest, where their jealous, petty natures are revealed, only because they are no longer bound by the chivalrous behavior of the court. Once the communal bonds have been broken or people have escaped from the security of civilizing forces, the characters are challenged to examine their world unfettered by conventional value systems. Sometimes an individual enters into a small community, bringing his or her own views or practices, and knocks the community’s lives off-kilter, as the Professor Serebryakov does in Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya (1894). All of his habits—his keeping late hours, his laziness and irregular meal times—disturb the standard schedule of the family members living on the estate and rekindle old passions and grievances. A comedy will typically move through quarrels and quandaries towards reconciliation, and by the play’s end, the society is reorganized around stable relationships: family members are reunited or lovers are married. This new society is similar to the previous one but individuals have a greater understanding of themselves and the rules that govern them. At the end Uncle Vanya, the various characters are saddened by the loss of their illusions, but they reassert their sense of purpose in life; Sonya knows her work will light the way for others.

Stock Figures in Comedy In addition to looking at comedy structurally, we may also note some stock figures prevalent in comedy, primarily as the trickster figure. This archetypal character is a stock figure in many cultural mythologies, from European folktales

Dramatic Comedy to Native American stories. Appearing variously as a god, a spirit, a human being, or even an animal, the trickster’s central defining quality is his desire to play pranks on others, either out of malice or simply to have fun. Often a wily underdog, he thrives on outwitting his opponents and breaking the rules of law or of nature. As Langer notes, this character symbolizes ‘‘human vitality holding its own in the world.’’ An individual who does not succumb to defeat, but thinks on his feet and knows there is more than one way to skin a cat, the trickster figure embodies vitality and the life-force. In Plautus’s play Miles Gloriosus (The Braggart Soldier 204 B.C.), the trickster character is Palaestrio, the dexterous slave who helps his master, Nautiklus, get his girlfriend back after she has been kidnapped by the soldier. Because of the soldier’s vanity, Dexter finds it very easy to trick him, and the audience delights in watching a virtuoso sleight of hand whereby the arrogant authority figure is duped. Early trickster figures appear in medieval farces throughout Europe; Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c. 1552) is one such Tudor piece that sports a mischief-making character. Diccon, the mentally unstable character who supposedly escaped from the mental institution of Bedlam, wanders into a small town and gets three different people to accuse one another of stealing some prized object, starting with the eponymous needle. The pleasure of the play is the bedlam that ensues—all carefully orchestrated by Diccon himself. For trickster figures delight in creating mischief for mischief’s sake. Puck, who serves the fairy King Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1596), revels in his ability to play pranks on people, bragging about pulling out a step-stool from under a milking maid or neighing like a mare to arouse the stallions in the stable. His fame for playing pranks is so renowned that when he accidentally causes two men to fall in love with the same woman, the fairy King Oberon immediately accuses him of tomfoolery: ‘‘Thou mistak’st, Or else committ’st thy knaveries willfully.’’ Puck, rather than be abashed at his error, finds amusement in the confusion he has caused: ‘‘Lord, what fools these mortals be.’’ And in a much later Restoration piece, She Stoops to Conquer (1773), the ne’er-do-well character Tony Lumpkin successfully convinces his sister’s suitor into believing the house where he has arrived is an inn. Accordingly, the suitor—who has never met the family before—peremptorily treats the master of the house and the sister as the innkeeper and the maid, making monstrous social gaffes before his error is revealed. Tricksters, on a strictly functional level, may help to advance the plot, but their primary role is to stir up great gales of laughter. Trickster figures can predominate in comedies because the genre primarily showcases characters of the lower classes. Tragedies, according to Aristotle’s definition in the Poetics (c. 334–323 B.C.) follow the tribulations of high-placed, noble characters who are brought low by fate. Comedies witness the dilemmas of the common man or woman: ‘‘an imitation of persons who are inferior,’’

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Western Drama through the Ages Aristotle writes, ‘‘not, however, going all the way to full villainy, but imitating the ugly, of which the ludicrous is one part.’’ Thus servants, petty criminals, prostitutes, errant school children and other members lower on the social ladder can take part in the action because they are the foolish, inferior people that comedy relishes. Nicole, an impertinent servant in Molie`re’s play Le Bourgeoise Gentilhomme (1670) chastises her master for all the pretentious skills he is being taught at great expense and with little results: dancing, music, fencing, philosophy. It is comic to see the underling audaciously mocking her master, Monsieur Jourdain, because she inverts the power in the masterservant relationship with great spunk and wit. As Madame Jourdain tartly informs her husband: ‘‘Nicole’s quite right. She’s got more sense than you have. I’d like to know what you think you want with a dancing master at your age.’’ The clever servant may also assist his or her master, emphasizing the master’s idiocy all the more by his complete helplessness or inability to solve the most basic problems. In the famous final scene of Plautus’s Menaechmi (The Manaechmi Brothers 205–184 B.C.), Messenio leads his master and his master’s longlost twin brother through a rigorous deduction process to determine if they are truly related. Even though it is painfully obvious to all that the two brothers look exactly alike, Messenio highlights their idiocy and draws out the hilarity by proving without a doubt they share the same parentage. Such instrumental and cunning servants can be seen in Shakespeare’s Henry IV (1596–98) or Beaumarchais’s The Barber of Seville, which introduced clown-like servants that were so popular, namely Falstaff and Figaro, that their reputations prevail over that of their masters’. Clowns or fools are slightly different than tricksters in that they add to the frivolous atmosphere without necessarily playing tricks on others. They often speak their minds at the risk of insulting their betters. They have special license to speak bluntly, either because their position at court is so low that no one considers them a threat, or because their chief function is to offer witticisms to delight a king or duke. Such freedom to speak one’s mind often yields the truth, and these characters do become—if not a spokesperson for the playwright—a voice of wisdom poking through the nonsense. The wise fool figures in tragedies such as King Lear, but he also appears to make such pronouncements in comedies like Twelfth Night. As the clown, Feste’s responsibility is to cheer up his mistress, Olivia, who is mourning her brother’s death. He tells her riddles and finally rebukes her by pointing out the illogical reasoning behind her grief; her grief is wasted because her brother is in heaven. Bertolt Brecht’s character of Azdak in The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1962) represents the wise fool, a man who becomes a judge during a period of war and who makes radical decisions that at first glance seem illogical and wacky. Although the play is not a comedy

Dramatic Comedy per se, it draws upon romantic folk tales and uses the wise clown as a motif. Azdak turns out to be a Robin Hood character. His judgments favor the peasants who are at the mercy of the wealthy, powerful upper-classes and his bizarre expressions are mixed with wisdom. In brief, tricksters and clowns are figures of fun. They import nonsense into comedies and remind the characters of their own ability to laugh and triumph. Foolishness is necessary to keep life full, vital, and bright, and both tricksters and clowns understand this rejuvenating element. As Santayana states: ‘‘Reason cannot stand alone; brute habit and blind play are at the bottom of art and morals, and unless irrational impulses and fancies are kept alive, the life of reason collapses for sheer emptiness.’’

Comedy’s Common Events in Life Comedy looks at the common events in life, rather than the extraordinary. Tragedy considers the singular plight of the individual and considers the particular event as it pertains to this character and to no other. For example, the troubled lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream understand their predicament by comparing it to a litany of other lovers for whom ‘‘The road of true love never did run smooth’’—a deliberation not undertaken by Romeo and Juliet who saw their ‘‘star-crossed’’ turmoil as unique. It is no surprise that tragedies often bear the names of individual figures, who are defined by the events that shape them, such as Oedipus, Hamlet, Cato, The Emperor Jones, or Death of a Salesman, while comedies are often named after collectivities, like The Birds, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Every Man in His Humor, The School for Scandal, The Learned Ladies, and more recently, Uncommon Women. For comedy emphasizes what keeps us together as a society, not what separates us as individuals; it emphasizes the communal. And laughter tends to increase the feeling of community within the audience. The old adage ‘‘laugh and the world laughs with you; cry and you cry alone’’ holds true, but it is more than the willingness to share good times. Laughter is infectious; it stands in need of an echo, it draws people in emotionally and warms them with feelings of camaraderie and good will. Comedy, more so than tragedy, breaks into a variety of subgenres. While all of them share basic characteristics, such as a delight in complications, a spirit of resiliency, a law-defining scenario, and an emphasis on community, it is important to recognize how these subgenres differ from one another. Satire, comedy of manners, romantic comedy, farce, and tragicomedy, are some of the varieties of the comic that are considered in this chapter. Other categories of comedy certainly exist, but these five tend to be the essential subgenres which contain the fundamental properties.

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FIVES TYPES OF COMEDY Satire Satire rises to the top of the list because it is the oldest form of comedy and because most comedies have some element of corrective laughter to them. Aristophanes’s highly satirical play Lysistrata (411 B.C.) delights in attacking the Athenian government for its involvement in the ongoing Peloponnesian war, suggesting that if women were in power, there would be no more wars. The women take over the Acropolis and deny their husbands any sexual relations until the men agree to a truce with the other warring city-states. Lysistrata brings the men of Greece—literally—to their knees. The satire scoffs at the stupidity of war as much as it derides how men (and women) are driven by their sexual needs. The objective behind satire is to get the audience to recognize their own faults or shortcomings in the onstage characters and, in thus seeing themselves criticized, mend their bad behaviors. We are more likely to adjust a character flaw within ourselves if that flaw is portrayed as the object of derision. Saturday Night Live skits, whether they focus on feel-good psychiatry, the work place, or awkward racial relations, can encourage audiences to examine their own behavior by a mocking depiction of others. Typically, it is the prominent types who find themselves the objects of satire, authority figures who consider themselves too self-important and who have lost the ability to see their own shortcomings. One of the earliest figures of satire, Miles Gloriosus (Braggart Soldier), showed himself as vaunting endlessly about his battle deeds, his military dexterity, and his courage, only to run at the slightest sign of aggression. In one scene, the soldier depicts himself as god’s gift to women, and the characters pretend to compliment him, while insulting him behind his back. Milphidippa sets up the scene: ‘‘An attractive man like you, endowed with such perfect physique and unparalleled prowess in battle. What man could more pass for a god?’’ But it is Palaestrio’s barbed aside that gets the laughs: ‘‘He sure can’t pass for human. Dear God, a buzzard is more humane.’’ In addition to military men, other authority figures like doctors, lawyers, and professors become the fodder for a satirical onslaught. These highly trained specialists whose knowledge holds them above the average citizen are the likeliest figures to jeer at because they act the most condescending. Their erudition and large fees make them easy to resent, and thus even easier to mock; likely methods of lampoon consist of having the characters speak in nonsensical Latin, or having them offer medical or legal remedies that are so preposterous the characters become no more than buffoons. Two of the most popular dramatic satirists in early European literature were Ben Jonson and Jean-Louis Poqueline, known as Molie`re. Jonson’s play Volpone (1606) showcased the greediness of mankind in its love of money. Volpone opens the play

Dramatic Comedy speaking directly to his gold, praising its worth over that of the sun’s and describing his pernicious plot to get more money. As he pretends to lie dying, vulture-like men encircle Volpone’s deathbed in hope of being his favored heir, proffering him gifts as tokens of their affection, while unknowingly playing right into his hands. Each character appears more foolish than the last, and yet Volpone’s manipulations know no bounds: he successfully convinces a man to allow him to rape his wife. The comedy turns darker and more discomfiting as the play transpires; what begins as good fun ends up taking on a sharp edge. Jonson hoped to make his satire sting the audience into recognizing the mercenary greed abounding within the professional class of London and his preface insists that the audiences’ cheeks will be ‘‘rubbed raw with laughter.’’ Molie`re’s satires, which appeared fifty years later, have a more buoyant tone and are decidedly less caustic. His plays have a degree of physical clowning and nonsensical word play that comes from a background in improvisational theater; nonetheless, his satirical thrust still cuts deep. George Meredith, in ‘‘An Essay on Comedy,’’ says about Molie`re: ‘‘Never did man wield so shrieking a scourge upon vice.’’ For Molie`re believed in satire’s potential to correct bad behavior, as he mentions in the preface of Tartuffe (1667): If the function of comedy is to correct men’s vices, I do not see why any should be exempt. . . .The most forceful lines of a serious moral statement are usually less powerful than those of satire; and nothing will reform most men better than the depiction of their faults. It is a vigorous blow to vices to expose them to public laughter. Criticism is taken lightly, but men will not tolerate satire. They are quite willing to be mean, but they never like to be ridiculed.

In The Misanthrope, Molie`re attacks the hypocrisy of the royal court, but his complex argument also considers the opposite point of view: how a strict sense of honesty can deteriorate the social fabric. The central figure Alceste decides to be completely straightforward with his fellowmen, but his subsequent frank comments end up insulting many people at the court. For example, a poet Oronte arrives at Alceste’s house in order to obtain his opinion of his poem. Though he says he wants honest feedback, he is hurt and angered by Alceste’s criticism, and Alceste lacks the necessary diplomacy to assuage his feelings. By the play’s end, Alceste’s candidness has caused a fight with his fiance´e and a court indictment and he decides to leave society altogether. Hypocrisy likewise bears the brunt of Molie`re’s attack in Tartuffe, but this time the play follows a religious hypocrite who acts so pious and sanctimonious that he earns the keys to the main character’s house and heart. Not only does Tartuffe dupe Orgon into letting him take up residency; he convinces Orgon to disinherit his own son and rewrite his will in Tartuffe’s name. At the end of such satires, justice prevails; Jonson’s Volpone is punished and Tartuffe is put in prison, illustrating the judgment of each playwright.

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Western Drama through the Ages Satire is a form that appeals to the intellect, particularly when an individual can use a play as a method of self-correction. As George Meredith claims in his ‘‘Essay on Comedy’’: ‘‘You may estimate your capacity for comic perception by being able to detect the ridicule of them you love without loving them less; and more by being able to see yourself somewhat ridiculous in dear eyes, and accepting the correction their image of you proposes.’’ But oftentimes satirists ran into trouble with the public who saw themselves too clearly through the satirists’ eyes and felt insulted by the image they saw. Molie`re had to defend his play Tartuffe aggressively by insisting it was not a satire against the Catholic Church, but against the tyranny of hypocrites.

The Comedy of Manners While these stereotypical figures such as the braggart warrior or the miserly old man serve as perfect objects of satire, they did not originate in satirical comedy but rather in another form of classical drama: the comedy of manners. The focus on individual character types in society became the interest of Plautus and Terence, Roman playwrights who had inherited an earlier Greek form known as ‘‘New Comedy’’ from Menander. Referred to simply as ‘‘comedy’’ during the third and second centuries B.C., this next form develops a plot around particular personality types in society—the clever servant, the stodgy parents, the kind-hearted prostitute—and examines how people follow the social conventions and mores of their day and age. The comedy of manners is the forerunner of our modern-day situation comedy, with its fascination for human interactions, whether it be a merchant class of ancient Rome or a group of young professionals living in New York City. Such comedies will scoff at the manners, customs, speech patterns, and rituals of the upper and middle classes in particular, because of the very artificial nature of such behaviors. Henri Bergson, in his important essay on comedy ‘‘Laughter,’’ theorizes about possible sources of humor, and suggests that we laugh when we find some mechanical quality in a living human being. Thus the social niceties and good breeding that enable us to mix and mingle in polite society are essentially rigid constructions that we impose upon our more base desires. William Congreve’s Restoration comedy The Way of the World (1700) reveals an upper-class culture that uses etiquette and witty language to cover up its dishonorable intentions as the characters manipulate one another. One character’s apt name of Fainall (feign-all) implies the simulated nature of all the characters and points to the false world they live in—a world where the play’s hero has earlier married off his pregnant lover to his friend by assuring him of a large dowry. An older, sexually desirous woman, Lady Wishfort (wish-for-it), is successfully blackmailed when she over-hastily engages herself to a man who turns out to be a servant disguised as a knight. She must concede to the conspirators’ demands

Dramatic Comedy or risk being made a public ridicule. In all of these situations, the characters base their actions on how they will appear to society. Their cultivated manners allow them to protect their inner selves against the immorality of others, but at the same time, prohibit them from being honest with one another. Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) likewise illustrates how the polite veneer of manners can cover up humanity’s vulgar desires. In the renowned tea party scene, two women who despise one another for being in love with the same man make a pretense of social felicities under the ritualistic dictates of a tea ceremony. Wilde’s play wittily sends up all the customary habits of courtship in which couples partake—not out of love, but out of social necessity. Lady Bracknell, a grand matron in society, inquires about Jack Worthing’s residence, financial status, and lineage to ascertain the appropriateness of his marriage to her daughter, engaging him in a series of questions that demonstrates her obsession with class. Wilde’s satire shows these formulaic elements of courtship have reduced lovemaking to a series of perfunctory social arrangements. Comedies of manners essentially explore the ways in which social customs undermine the veracity of human relationships. One of George Bernard Shaw’s best plays, Arms and the Man (1894), pokes fun at how two young lovers require an unrealistic and glorified view of war in order to serve as a background to their romance. The young man must be able to pose as a brave warrior and she as a heroine in order for their affair to appear passionate to themselves. Their illusions and heroic stances are later rendered ridiculous when contrasted to the pragmatic soldier Bluntschli who would rather save his own skin than fight, yet proves to be truly courageous. Comedies of manners are often preoccupied with the highly artificial and constructed ways in which people speak. Language serves as an artful way of manipulating others or disguising one’s true intentions. The characters in both the Way of the World and The Importance of Being Earnest are masters of verbal dexterity and use words to confuse the truth of the situation and to get what they want. As Wilde’s character Algernon wittily states: ‘‘The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!’’ Wit, repartee, and other forms of verbal banter that constitute a comedy of manners are as instrumental as they are decorative. The wordplay is indicative of the character’s personality and morals; the one with the shrewdest comeback wins. For wit requires an agility of mind, the ability to perceive the truth about a situation and to express it succinctly. Paradox is one form of wit, whereby a statement can seem false or odd at first, but upon reflection can reveal a deeper truth. Algernon’s comment about a widowed friend of the family’s whose ‘‘hair has turned quite gold from grief’’ at first seems implausible, until we remember that a woman might benefit handsomely from her husband’s demise.

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Western Drama through the Ages Repartee, or the rapid-fire retorts in a verbal duel, often permeates a comedy of manners, as each character offers smart, quick rejoinders to his colleague’s remarks. The speed and aptness of the speaker’s reply impresses us in its ability to reverse or to best the person’s last remark. In The Way of the World, the two lovers are well-suited because of their ability to engage in repartee; the sparks seem to fly from their clever banter as they prove their sharp intellect in a linguistic sword fight. When the young Mirabelle seems particularly pleased that her fiance´ finds her beautiful, her lover takes her down a notch: ‘‘You are no longer handsome when you’ve lost your lover,’’ Millamant tells her, because ‘‘your beauty dies upon the instant; for beauty is the lover’s gift.’’ In this world of surfaces where it is dangerous to reveal one’s true feelings and run the risk of being blackmailed, wit allows Millamant the ideal device for hiding his true affections behind a clever defense of words and not getting hurt by a beautiful lover. The early nineteenth century offered a variation of the comedy of manners that was less bawdy than the early Restoration plays, and more kindly about the potential of the human heart. Sentimental comedies were meant to offer the wit and exuberance of the earlier plays, but with more polished and refined characters. No longer did the antics of lustful rakes like Jack Horner in The Country Wife (1675) drive the action, but instead characters were motivated out of genuine concern for one another. Famous English sentimental playwrights were Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Sheridan. Sheridan’s play School for Scandal (1777), consisted of a ‘‘college’’ of scandalmongers who met for the sole purpose of raking others’ reputations over the coals. The dialogue is ripe with the witty quips and aphorisms of earlier Restoration drama. However the play’s belief in innate human goodness and the benevolent actions of other characters moves it into the realm of sentimental drama. In France, where the form was known as comedie larmoyante, or tearful comedy, the master practitioner was Marivaux who revealed the inner workings of the human heart with a language infinitely exquisite and tender. Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux placed his characters in unique circumstances where they had to carefully examine the psychological workings of their own heart, often with wiser characters eavesdropping on these discoveries. Often they wander with childlike innocence through their affairs, discovering love, jealously, and betrayal and offering charmingly turned phrases to express these sensations. Marivaux wrote for an aristocratic eighteenth century audience preoccupied with affairs of the heart, perpetuated through their courtly literature of poetry, lyrics, and intimate journals. His plays offer introspective pronouncements on romance; the recognition, for example, that we enjoy relationships because we delight in being admired by another, and having society see a lover admiring us. Marivaux was fond of writing about vain, adolescent women; he has one character gleefully in La Dispute (1744) delighting in her own beauty: ‘‘I shall spend the rest of my life

Dramatic Comedy contemplating me, and soon I’ll even fall in love with myself.’’ But we can excuse foolish vanity in a comedy; as Santayana writes: ‘‘The foolishness of the simple is delightful; only the foolishness of the wise is exasperating.’’ In another of Marivaux’s plays, Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (The Game of Love and Chance, 1730), two people find their fathers arranging their marriage, so they disguise themselves as their servants. Meanwhile, their servants have been disguised as their masters. When the two finally do meet, they inevitably fall in love, but because they are under the impression they are in love with another person’s servant, they worry about loving someone of a lower class. This chasse´-croise´ unfolds so that each character feels affection for their proper mate, but in the meantime, the characters spend much time in emotional self-torture, examining the natures of their heart and their attitude toward class. Well into the twentieth century we find other playwrights who continue a tradition that the Restoration writers established: the laughing attack on marriage. The British writer Noel Coward offered atypical perspectives on romantic relationships during the jazz age, often with wry commentary about the usefulness of conventional morality. Coward’s play highlights, as most good comedies of manners do, the games that people play with language, and his dialogue glistens with sardonic humor and clever double entendres. In one play, Design for Living (1933), a lovetriangle develops between three good friends, where each act finds the characters involved in a different permutation of their relationship. Another play, Private Lives (1930), is inhabited by two newlywed couples who discover, on their honeymoons, that the husband of one couple has been previously married to the other man’s wife. They rekindle their own flame and run off to Paris together, leaving their new husband and wife behind. Neither play offers a moral pronouncement against infidelity but rather suggests it as the natural outgrowth of creative minds. Characters, in fact, must discover how to behave based on a new ethical system. One husband remarks: ‘‘this situation is entirely without precedent. We have no prescribed etiquette to fall back on.’’ Prescribed etiquette is exactly the target upon which comedy of manners aims its mocking glances.

Romantic Comedy The third form of comedy, the romantic comedy, is typically the kind most people envision when they hear the word ‘‘comedy.’’ In fact, romantic comedies share many of the same conventions with other forms, particularly sentimental comedies in their intense scrutiny of affairs of the heart. Shakespeare is often considered the father of romantic comedies, even though he borrowed many of his plots from the early Roman comedy of manners. The name ‘‘romantic comedy’’ comes not from a preoccupation with romantic love, but rather because the form was based on French medieval poems—the romans—which detailed the

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Western Drama through the Ages marvelous adventures of imaginary or idealized heroes. These romances, later adapted into prose form like The Tales of King Arthur, were filled with twists and turns and usually required a dashing hero to overcome knotty problems in order to obtain the love of an engaging and beautiful woman. While love may be the focus of romantic comedies, it is only an end result that guides his actions; getting the girl is secondary to the twists and turns of the adventure. Even when the lover himself is incapacitated by the heady, walking-on-air sensation of being in love, his servant or sidekick usually comes to his rescue and assists him in his mission. The exuberance of love, the illusory feeling that one will love ‘‘forever and a day,’’ creates the festal feeling in the romantic comedy. But the festive orientation is also countered by the foolishness of the lover, for the lover is subject to passionate emotional swings. The lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream spend the night chasing or being pursued by the wrong lover and quarreling with one another until a magic potion sorts everyone out. Romantic comedy laughs at the foolish behavior of lovers due to the extreme emotions they suffer: jealousy, despondency, elation, enchantment. Immune to human emotions, Puck can sit back and smugly proclaim ‘‘Lord, what fools these mortals be’’ while watching the antics of the four lovers. In Twelfth Night we witness characters falling in love not only with the wrong person but with the wrong person’s disguise, and the dilemma is only fixed when the Viola, disguised as a man, reveals her identity. A romantic comedy follows the comic tribulations of lovers and their emotional upheavals, exposing to ridicule the passionate and irrational reactions these lovers experience to the most trivial events. Wife-chasing or husband-catching scenarios are prevalent plots of romantic comedy, where sometimes lovers are unaware of their own emotions until they are gently nudged (or sometimes pushed) in the right direction. In G. B. Shaw’s play Man and Superman (1907), a charmingly aggressive young woman pursues an iconoclastic political activist who disagrees with the institution of marriage. He delivers tirades against marriage even while the ‘‘trap’’ of matrimony tightens around him. The goal of most romantic comedies is not satirical commentary, character analysis, or a critique of social mores, but entertainment through clever plotting. Modern day romantic comedies include plays by Neil Simon or movies like When Harry met Sally. A good romantic comedy must follow the rollercoaster pursuit of courtship and romance and end when the boy has obtained the girl. This is the only logical conclusion for comedy; as Puck notes during A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘‘Jack shall have Jill; Nought shall go ill.’’ Even though romantic comedies exist as forms of pure pleasure, this kind of comedy also provides insights into the human heart. The most recognizable pattern of a romantic comedy consists of a stable, rule-bound society shifting into one of chaos and confusion, before reverting back to stability and order. While this conceptual design applies to many comedies, it predominates within festive

Dramatic Comedy or romantic plays. C.L. Barber identifies this shifting pattern from normalcy to holiday spirit as a ‘‘saturnalian’’ pattern, and finds its roots in the Elizabethan periodic observance of sports and feast days. Many of the secular and Churchsanctioned holidays in early Europe offered periods of festivity and merrymaking which gave the citizens a feeling of release from their daily burdens of work, whether the release involved dancing, drinking, eating, or sexual wantonness. While we might call this practice a ‘‘safety-valve’’ mechanism which provided people with a holiday in order to prevent them from bursting under the weight of their everyday work, it is important to realize that this release also led to clarification. This period of uninhibited indulgence in pleasure meant the citizens were free to view the world from a different perspective, through the lens of a ‘‘holiday’’ instead of a ‘‘workday.’’ A lover is a typically lazy individual who escapes his work (lazes about) to fantasize about his loved one. This ‘‘holiday humor’’ appears in comedy whenever characters escape from responsibility, class decorum, or even gender roles. Men in Plautine comedies always attempt to flee their wives or get out of civic work in order to be with their concubines, and many a slave finds ways to avoid their masters’ assigned tasks. And women in Shakespearean comedies frequently escape the limitations of their gender, as when Viola in Twelfth Night dresses like a man as a means of self-preservation. This division between everyday and holiday, with its emphasis on shedding workday concerns and experiencing greater freedoms, becomes the dominant pattern for most festive comedies. Characters leave their stable-but-problematic society to go to a place free from rules but with ensuing chaos, to return finally to their stable location with greater knowledge. When Demetrius, at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream wakes up from his night in the forest, he says, ‘‘methinks I see the world with parted eye, where everything seems double.’’ He now recognizes that the aristocratic space of the court hides another world beneath its polished veneer—a world where uncivil passions lurk. The character of Vivie Warren, in Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), discovers during the course of the play that her mother’s wealth came from her previous work as a prostitute, but even this discovery is not all; through the chaotic encounters that ensue, she learns more importantly that much capitalist wealth depends upon the exploitation of women. The final moments of the play, where the daughter negates any further relationship with her mother, are not uplifting, but instructive; Vivie Warren sees her world for what it is and chooses a path morally superior to her mother’s. The role reversal between Vivie and her mother, where the daughter takes on the role of the mature adult, is frequently seen in comedy and can be explained by another medieval Church holiday: the Feast of Fools. This early celebration reversed the hierarchical order of the religious positions within the church. The lower clergy would take on the higher positions in the church for a brief period, and even the youngest boy was permitted to put on the Bishop’s robes. This kind

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Western Drama through the Ages of revolution in positions, where a dignified role is occupied by a subordinate for a few hours, provided people with a greater understanding of the responsibilities and right governing Church hierarchy, i.e., why the Bishop was due respect. The religious inversion of roles can be seen within comedies whenever the lower character rises to a superior post and provides a topsy-turvy component to the comedies: a servant besting his master, a child outwitting his parent, a citizen seizing control of the government. Thus the festival patterns at play in romantic comedies create a sensation of a holiday period, a release from daily constraints, which provides the characters with a sense of clarification and enlightenment when they return to their stable environment. Often this return to stability is underscored by a marriage, dance, or feast. A dance, with its grouping of individuals who are connected hand-in-hand, becomes symbolic of a community’s coalescence. Nor is it a static grouping, but suggestive of energy and the life pulse. Aristophanic comedies end in wild, wine-soaked finales, Shakespearen comedies resolve themselves in marriages and festal dances, and many plays end in dance, including the ballet that turns Monsieur Jordain into a Grand Turk in Molie`re’s The Would-Be Gentleman. The image of a group of people joining hands in dance signifies community and concord. George Bernard Shaw’s romantic comedy You Never Can Tell (1900) has a masked ball at the end, signifying that while some issues between the father and his estranged family members can never be fully solved, they are willing to cover up these differences and join hands in reconciliation. Some communities do not extend the hand to maleficent characters and instead forcibly eject them from their gathering, the most famous example being the treatment of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. As Malvolio attests, after having been kept alone in a dark cellar: ‘‘I have been most notoriously abused.’’ The process whereby a community gathers together only after it has vilified a particular member is called scapegoating and it allows that group to define itself by constructing an image of what it is not. In the celebratory atmosphere of Twelfth Night, Malvolio represents someone decorous and proper, at odds with the community’s desire to be mischievous and jolly. Identifying a scapegoat also allows the community to dispel its negative energy and rancor onto someone outside of itself, rather than keeping it within; scapegoating permits the community to unify against a common enemy and allows a discharge of vitriolic emotions, rather than directing it within.

Farce The discomfort that underpins Twelfth Night’s merriment is created by our sympathetic response toward Malvolio; we feel sorry that while everyone else’s fortunes have resulted in happiness, Malvolio has been mistreated. This darker side of comedy finds its home in another form of comedy known as farce, where

Dramatic Comedy characters are often subject to some painful predicament. Farce originates in a traditional dramatic form based in southern Italy around the 1500’s known as commedia dell’arte, or comedy of the artisans, i.e., the professional actors. This kind of comedy was largely improvisational and consisted of broad, bawdy humor, that today we consider slapstick. The individual plays were made up of smaller bits of practical jokes, known as lazzi. A lazzo (singular form) such as stepping on the prongs of a rake and having it swing upward to smack the character in the face, could be interwoven with bits of choreographed horseplay and develop the plot of the improvised story. Physical humor is still the defining element in farce. Farce tends to be a lowbrow comedy, a comedy mainly known for eliciting ‘‘belly-laughs’’ with its knock-about gestures, its quick timing and speed. Farce, more than any kind of comedy, portrays the animalistic side of human beings in their base pursuit for food, money, sex, or sleep, and shows us the potential consequences of these desires. Here especially applies the ‘‘safetyvalve’’ theory of comedy by which we might gain some release seeing our fantasies acted out upon the stage. The constraints of position, class, or marriage are lifted off of our shoulders as we watch the characters’ rebellious behavior before us. As Eric Bentley notes, ‘‘Farce in general offers a special opportunity. We enjoy the privilege of being totally passive while on stage our most treasured unmentionable wishes are fulfilled before our eyes.’’ Thus farce invites us to live vicariously through the characters, whether their desires overturn the social order or remain a simple indulgence in an afternoon’s frivolities. Even the classical Greeks, who are more frequently associated with dignified tragedy than bawdy comedy, participated in farcical displays of the body, using a great deal of padding on the posterior and belly to emphasize how the body can be a source of fun and humiliation. Aristophanes’s play Lysistrata relied upon a small string device inside the costumes that, when pulled, would lift a phallus and simulate an erection. Mikhail Bakhtin, studying the French writer Rabelais, comes to similar conclusions about the bawdy nature of popular festive forms, and notes in particular how the carnival celebrations in many medieval towns would focus on the genitalia or lower body parts. He reasons that the emphasis on these procreative areas of the body affirms the immortality of the human race, and argues how comedy is a celebration of this life-giving element. Molie`re’s farces involve characters chasing and smacking one another, typical of a Punch and Judy show where the blows are frequent and violent yet seem to cause no harm. In his short farce, The Doctor in Spite of Himself, the husband thrashes his wife in the first scene, so she, in revenge, convinces some wandering men in search of a doctor to beat her husband. She explains that her husband is shy about his talents and will only reveal his profession if they thwack him soundly. It may surprise us to find ourselves laughing at another’s discomfort, but herein lies another chief element of comedy, the practice of emotionally distancing

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Western Drama through the Ages ourselves from the ongoing violence or an individual’s pain, a tendency Henri Bergson labeled ‘‘the momentary anesthesia of the heart.’’ The misfortunes that befall Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton are further examples of the violence inherent in farce, yet the pain never seems real. A more recent example of farce is Joe Orton’s contemporary play What the Butler Saw, which abounds in extreme harm to human beings; a woman is placed in a straitjacket and has her hair cut against her will; others are given sedatives or slapped about, and threatening gun shots ring out. We laugh at the antics not because we are unfeeling, but because the behavior of the characters is so frantic that the high speed removes human feeling from the equation. Bergson’s idea about the mechanical quality encrusted upon the living [indicated above] is again apt, because automatic quality is imposed upon human beings. The characters begin to seem more like cartoon-figures or robotic individuals than human beings; they are on automatic pilot and unable to make decisions for themselves. Perhaps the most daring figure of farcical theater of all-time is King Ubu (Ubu Roi 1896). This character, a creation of Alfred Jarry, was meant to shock the audiences and explode classical notions of logical, plot-driven theater. With his string of obscenities, his constant threatening, torturing, and killing of those around him, and his crass behavior—which includes brandishing a toilet plunger as a scepter—the bumbling King Ubu manifests the gluttonous desire to usurp power in the most childish, selfish, and heinous way. As King of Poland, he kills off all the noblemen in order to gain their property for himself; he exterminates them all at once by shoving them into a hole in the ground, like getting rid of excess baggage. The entertainment value of King Ubu comes not from sensible plot or well-fashioned dialogue, but in witnessing a grotesque, overblown adolescent annihilate the world around him. Marriage more often than not serves as the domain of farce. The strict moral laws governing marriage are an easy target for the impish comic spirit. Vows of love and honor, commandments against adultery, and legal ramifications of matrimony establish a limit situation against which the characters’ sexual libidos go wild. Comedy in general mocks marriage, from the bantering and badgering between husbands and wives in Roman comedy to the hurtful jabs at marriage in the Restoration play The Way of the World. As Mirabell advises his friend Mrs. Fainall: ‘‘You should have just so much disgust for your husband as may be sufficient to relish your lover.’’ Many comedies depict the age-old battle between the sexes as something perpetually comical; Terence’s play The Motherin-Law is filled with husbands’ rants about their trouble-making wives—and wives trying to defend themselves. Sostrata justifies herself to the audience: ‘‘I am not guilty! But clearing my name won’t be easy. Men are stuck on the notion that mothers-in-law are unjustifiably evil.’’ According to the Roman playwrights, marriage to a woman is such a burden that even the smallest allusion to it will

Dramatic Comedy garner great laughs. Marriage jokes continue over the centuries. Watching the opening scene from Sheridan’s The Critic is to witness both a husband and wife respectively dismayed that their spouse cannot behave. Mrs. Dangle deplores her husband’s foray into the theater and believes he is making a fool of himself. When he badgers her to join him, she tartly replies: ‘‘Isn’t it sufficient to make yourself ridiculous about your passion for the theater, without continually teasing me about to join you?’’ With marriage in mind as an ideal target of ridicule, a number of writers began popularizing a form known as bedroom farce at the beginning of the 19th century, the chief among them being Georges Feydeau. This French playwright would place his characters in the most preposterous situation, mix in some sexual raciness and imbroglios, and logically and precisely have all the problems reconciled by the curtain’s close. His play Le Manage de Baril-Ion (On the Marry-go-Wrong, 1907) involves a woman who accidentally marries her son-in-law, only to discover that her husband, who was presumed dead, has returned from his two-year hiatus and now chastises her for becoming a ‘‘bigamistress.’’ Many of his plays witness mistresses and lovers dallying in boudoirs only to escape into a closet or through a back door seconds before the arrival of the unexpected spouse. Another play, A Flea in Her Ear (La Puce a` l’oreille, 1909), incorporates a revolving bed which allows a character to push a button and disappear into the next room—a contrivance that results in hilarious and nightmarish consequences. The genre depends on virtuoso, high-speed antics, well-plotted confusion and surprise, and the audience’s superior knowledge of the onstage characters’ whereabouts. There is also a slight guilty pleasure to be had from living out our secret fantasies on the stage, without suffering the repercussions ourselves. Joe Orton acknowledges this voyeuristic drive inherent in marital farce: he offers us every kind of forbidden desire or sexual perversion in What the Butler Saw (1969): necrophilia, exhibitionism, rape, sadomasochism, fetishism, nymphomania, and implied incest. What alleviates our anxiety or guilt about our fantasy life being played out before us the laughter. Rather than experience self-disapproval toward our own fantasies, we let down our censoring mechanisms and laugh uproariously at the characters’ antics. Laughter permits us to examine truths about human nature without succumbing to our judgmental super-ego.

Tragicomedy The final form of comedy is tragicomedy—a form that has decidedly marked the twentieth century. Tragicomedies seem tonally wrong. They might combine a feeling of optimism with a queer underlying worry. The characters may make humorous comments but meanwhile they appear to be suffering through distressful circumstances. Funny events may occur but they lack any clear causal

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Western Drama through the Ages relationship with actions that happened previously and thus our laughter seems out of place. As the name suggests, a tragicomedy can be viewed as mixture of two genres, tragedy and comedy, but more precisely, it is a structured series of tragic events within a comic atmosphere. Robert Corrigan, in a helpful essay on tragicomedy, explains that the world from which tragicomedy emerges is one of ambiguous values; it is the aristocratic Chekhovian drama on the eve of the Russian communist revolution, or the apocalyptic no-man’s land of Samuel Beckett’s figures following World War II. Chekhov deliberately created no heroes or villains in his plays, and thus there is no ethical system by which to judge the characters; we never know whether the hero or villain ‘‘got what they deserved.’’ Beckettian characters are kept in trash cans, or stuck in piles of sand, or left forgotten and stranded. Despite these bleak scenarios these plays are comic because the spirit of optimism reigns, not in a falsely cheery way, but with the characters’ wry resignation that one has no choice but to endure. Tragicomedy examines areas of the human experience that are atypical topics for comedy—death, aging, sickness, consciousness, or regret—and simultaneously showcases the elasticity of the human spirit. This is not to say that tragicomedies are falsely heartening and inspirational, far from it; rather they sardonically convey an attitude of acceptance—the belief that one must take responsibility for one’s life. For example, Anton Chekhov’s character Uncle Vanya (1899) is greatly disillusioned to discover that his lifelong project doing research for his relative was meaningless when he discovers the professor is a pompous fraud and that his treatises on modern art are self-contradictory and banal. Vanya bemoans his fate so tragically that we share his pain, but we also are moved to laughter at his excessive emotions and dejected self-view: ‘‘I am forty-seven years old; I may live to sixty; I still have thirteen years before me; an eternity! What shall I do? How can I fill them? Don’t you see, if only I could live the rest of my life in some new way.’’ His speech resounds tragically with regret and bleakness, but it is also a comic moment because he pathetically overdoes his emotions; he makes his plight seem larger-than-life. Tragicomedy, more than other plays, clearly shows characters searching for some meaning in their lives. Beckett’s character Clov sarcastically wonders aloud in Endgame (1958) ‘‘Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that’s a good one!’’ The peculiar emotional experience of seeing a tragicomedy is an unusual juxtaposition of impressions; one experiences the deep and profound sufferings of the character, but some comic line or gesture goes too far, and pushes the spectator to view the scene with more detachment. And with that detachment comes a philosophical attitude toward life. As George Meredith reminds us, the comic perspective is one of intelligence, not emotion: ‘‘The comic, which is the perceptive, is the governing spirit.’’ We may want to call these plays tragic instead of comic, since the characters suffer from the bleakness of their lives or their dashed dreams, but we must not

Dramatic Comedy overlook the crucial feature of these plays: human resiliency. These characters continue to hope for a change of circumstances. Beckett’s two tramps in Waiting for Godot (1953) will return the next day and the next to await this personage; Chekhov’s women in Three Sisters (1926) insist on planning their move to Moscow. Tragicomedy gives us characters whose dreams sustain them, even while they cynically consider their circumstances. Beckett’s Winnie, entombed up to her waist and then up to her neck in the earth, talks about adaptability: ‘‘I used to perspire freely. Now hardly at all. The heat is much greater. The perspiration much less. That is what I find so wonderful. The way man adapts himself. To changing conditions’’ (Happy Days 1961). Winnie makes a conscious decision to continue living each day; the revolver in her purse—which she kisses—is a constant reminder to her (and to us) that she could end her life if she so chose. The fact that she continues to live each day while contemplating the option of suicide is proof enough of the human spirit to endure. Beckett’s theater also forms part of another kind of comedy, termed ‘‘Theater of the Absurd’’ by Martin Esslin. Not an exact sub-genre of comedy per se, this style of comedy originated in the 1950s as a response to the atrocities of the two great World Wars and was influenced by a branch of philosophy known as existentialism. These plays often rely upon an absurd premise or absurd logic to explore the human condition, and often look at life through an alien lens. Eugene Ionesco’s play The Bald Soprano (1958) demonstrates the problematic nature of human language for communication, and his play The Lesson (1951), explores the sadistic nature of power. He demonstrates an absurd pedagogical relationship whereby the professor kills his student for not knowing the Neo-Spanish word for ‘‘knife.’’ Edward Albee shocked American audiences with an educated American couple, George and Martha, who delighted in torturing one another—and their guests— mentally and emotionally (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? 1962), while Harold Pinter in England revealed the darker psychoses underpinning family relationships in The Homecoming (1965). The group of playwrights who wrote absurdist dramas is not large, but their body of works left an impression on modern drama by their attack on scientific positivism—the naive belief that the world was a logical place that could be studied and understood. Perhaps Tom Stoppard is the contemporary playwright most influenced by the absurd tradition. His wellknown characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, borrowed from Hamlet, struggle to make sense of the world into which they have been thrust unawares (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead 1967). The simple action that begins the play, the coin-toss that perpetually comes up ‘‘heads,’’ exemplifies how laws of chance do not always apply and that the characters’ attempt to understand their fate is fruitless. In all cases, theater of the absurd makes us laugh by revealing the very human aspiration to determine a logical explanation for our existence and the fact that the search is ultimately absurd.

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COMEDY’S IMPORTANCE In our final analysis of comedy, we must acknowledge that it is impossible to define the genre by breaking it into subcategories or identifying the traits that differentiate it from tragedy. Many more qualities of comedy exist than those discussed in this essay. Henri Bergson stresses, for example, that comedy is humanistic, that it can only be found in human actions and scenarios: ‘‘The comic does not exist outside the pale of what is strictly human.’’ When we laugh at a dog or cat, for example, we laugh at a quality within them that reminds us of human nature. Similarly comedy depends to a great extent on nonverbal elements: on physical pratfalls and facial expressions, to be sure, but also on a quality known as ‘‘timing,’’ that is, the particular pacing and length of jokes. Likewise comedy appears to be a quality that does not translate, whether from one culture to another, from one language to another, or even from one generation to another. Whereas tragedy possesses a universal appeal, comedy seems bound not only by nation but by time. Finally comedy seems to rely upon a sense of incongruity, a recognition that there is a disparity between what is expected from a situation or a person and what is the ensuing result. Freud noted that laughter comes from seeing an individual make movements that were exaggerated and inexpedient and reasoned that the laughter we felt came from a sense of superiority. By comparing ourselves to the person observed, we detect an incongruity between what we would have done and the extra effort the person has displayed. Freud explains that ‘‘A person appears comic to us if. . .he makes too great an expenditure on his bodily functions and too little on his mental ones.. . .In these cases our laughter expresses a pleasurable sense of the superiority which we feel in relation to him.’’ In the play The Importance of Being Earnest, the two young women Cecily and Gwendolyn are disturbed by the fact that their fiance´s are not called Earnest: ‘‘Your Christian names are still an insuperable barrier. That is all.’’ Oscar Wilde has created a scenario where all the characters invest too much energy into inconsequential things, thus the subtitle: ‘‘A Trivial Comedy for Serious People.’’ And yet, comedy, with its lack of serious endeavors, with its concern for the trivial, the absurd, the incongruous, may be the most important genre for manifesting life upon the stage. Tragedy, because of its serious philosophical underpinnings and its search for integral positions in the face of crisis, provides us with a space to feel deeply for the ethical plights and moral dilemmas of our heroes. But comedy provides us with a way to see ourselves out of these plights, whether through clever solutions or moral compromises. It is the genre that acknowledges life’s difficulties, frames them with obstacles and shenanigans, yet challenges us to search for a solution or to at least believe, optimistically and faithfully, that the problem will rectify itself with a lucky shake of the dice. This belief, however fanciful, is still necessary, and the culture that finds itself shunning comedy finds

Dramatic Comedy itself empty and lifeless within. As Santayana remarks, ‘‘Where the spirit of comedy becomes constraint, reserve eats up the spirit, and people fall into a penurious melancholy in their scruple to be always exact, sane, reasonable.’’

FURTHER READING Bentley, E. ‘‘Farce.’’ The Life of the Drama. New York: Atheneum; 1964. Bergson, Henri. ‘‘Laughter.’’ In Sypher, 1956. Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. London: Hogarth Press; 1960. Frye, Northrop. ‘‘The Mythos of Spring: Comedy.’’ Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957. Langer, Susanne. ‘‘The Great Dramatic Forms: The Comic Rhythm.’’ Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. Meredith, George. ‘‘An Essay on Comedy.’’ In Sypher, 1956. Perry, H.T.E. Masters of Dramatic Comedy. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1939. Segal, Erich. The Death of Comedy. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001. Sypher, Wylie. Comedy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1956.

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Dramatic Comedy: A History of European and American Plays Reade Dornan

Defining comedy in dramatic literary works (as opposed to stand-up comedy, television sitcoms, vaudeville routines, game shows, and similar forms of popular entertainment) is problematic. First, there is no single uniform definition of the comic structure or the methodological approach to comedy. In its simplest terms, dramatic comedy could be defined as a situation that represents human experience in a stylized, imaginative, or caricature-like manner to arouse laughter and end happily. But some comedy, several of Shakespeare’s so-called ‘‘comedies ’’for example, arouses very little laughter and ends with only tenuously held harmony. So critical theorists have not been able to establish a single idea of comedy that they can all agree upon. Second, comedy has a complex of styles, categories, subgenres, and traditions, and many of these subgenres such as satire, farce, or parody have such well-developed forms that folding them into a snappy definition of comedy would hardly do justice to the literature. Third, if we were obliged to consider many of the lesser genres such as a comedy of morals or a comedy of reconciliation, we would cover only a fraction of the subgenres. Fourth, comedic tastes have varied through the centuries, so a single definition would inevitably favor one period’s perspectives over the others. To address these multiple issues, we offer instead a brief historical overview with embedded definitions of key terms that indicate their context, as well as a discussion of why and how comedy provokes smiles, laughter, and amusement. In deference to considerations of space, we will focus largely on European traditions in dramatic comedy and touch only on the major shifts in their development.

Dramatic Comedy: A History of European and American Plays

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMATIC COMEDY The historical development of European comedy begins with the Greeks. Most historians trace the beginnings of comedy to the performances in Athens at the festival of Dionysus (the City or Great Dionysia) in the fifth century B.C., in the time of Aristophanes (c. 450–380) and the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404). It is speculated that the term comedy originated in the Greek word for ‘‘procession,’’ komos, and that early Greek comedy found its origins in the Satyr plays. These were phallic rites with choruses of fat men, satyrs, men masquerading as animals, men on stilts, and processions of men carrying with large phallic symbols on poles. The festivals offered no scripted theater, but occasion for mockery and bawdy celebration. Comedy won its official status in the City Dionysia in 487–486 B.C., around fifty years after tragedy won recognition in 534. Aristophanes was among a handful of writers who wrote ‘‘Old Comedy,’’ characterized by their commentary on contemporary politics and social themes, primarily the Peloponnesian War, and lewd humor. Plays were performed in competitions twice a year—in late January and late March. Aristophanes won prizes for eight of his plays, including a lost version of Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata, and Frogs, which are still among his best known works today. ‘‘New Comedy’’ turned away from social and political themes toward featuring the everyday dilemmas of ordinary humans. This new style of comedy used the dramatic devices of concealed identity, coincidence, recognition of long lost relatives, and trickery. Some plays were farcical, while others were more seriously moral in tone. The language was neither as elevated nor as frankly salty as it was in Aristophanes’ day. Menander (c. 342–291) was a notable writer of New Comedy as were Roman playwrights such Plautus (c. 254–c.184 B.C.) and Terence (c.195 or 185–159 B.C.) . They burlesqued fools, even the gods, and they traded on financial worries, family relationships, and love affairs as subject matter. By the late fourth century B.C., Aristotle’s Poetics (c. 335–323) had codified the rules for both comedy and tragedy, notably by requiring a unity of action, time, and plot. What Aristotle meant by the unities has been the subject of debate for centuries, but he was generally promoting a tightly knit plot, short time of action, and a single setting, presumably because a play with a coherent theme and focused production values makes a greater impact than episodic narrative. Most of what Aristotle had to say about comedy was presumably spelled out in his lost Second Book, but in the surviving document, he argued that the pleasure in comedy is in imitation of what men do and so the ending should not be painful. He believed in a happy ending. He insisted that comic characters such as slaves, women, buffoons, parasites, impostors, and braggarts should be ludicrous, drawn from the lower or lesser stations in life. He said little about moral lessons, but it is clear that he had social norms in mind when

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Western Drama through the Ages he conceived of using universal themes to mock inappropriate social behavior. This form of comedy is known as indirect satire, which takes its humor from ridiculing the behavior of lesser characters to make its point. It is humor that laughs at characters rather than with them.

Medieval Comic Tradition Like the theater of the ancients, the medieval comic tradition grew out of religious performances around church feast days. From these early instances of ritual and ceremony, some comedy theorists contend that religion with its archetypal figures and seasonal rhythms is the wellspring of all comedy. The English cycle plays of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries reenacted Bible stories of the Old and New Testaments from the birth of Adam to the Day of Judgment. The most famous of the cycle plays were the Ludus Coventriae and those named after the towns where they originated—York, Chester, and Wakefield—in about 1375. They were also known as the myste`res, because they were performed by the various trades or ‘‘mysteries.’’ The biblical topics are handled more lightly than one would suppose. The mysteries remain popular for the low comedy that features braggarts, boisterous jokes, drunkards, and shrewish women. Like the plays of the Greeks, the mysteries use stock characters, ‘‘conventional character types,’’ such as Noah’s nagging wife, a hapless soul named Mak, a braggart who is a coward, the greedy, and the lecherous. Villainous characters are usually embarrassed and the comic heroes eventually triumph over their weaknesses and adversity. These characters enabled medievalists to exploit with obvious delight the fall of Lucifer, the temptation of Eve, the Seven Deadly Sins, and other human failures. In the motif of seasonal regeneration, there are burlesque parodies of sacred events, god figures, gargantuan feasting and perversion of children’s games. The themes are based on complaint about adversity, a fear of man’s fate and irrational change of fortune, attack on the hierarchy, and ridicule of deviant characters. Spectators could identify with Noah or Joseph as they question divine purpose and grumble about the little annoyances in life. Although these plays are often bitterly realistic and moralistic in intention, they contain enough farce and slapstick, even ribald parody, a barbed mimicking of someone’s style that they are highly entertaining even now.

The Renaissance By the sixteenth century, Italian comedy had its own tradition of populist theater in the commedia dell’arte players. This form of theater was known for its low comedy and improvisational style largely based on gesture and particular dialect. It was shaped by the traditions of Greek New Comedy and Roman theater, particularly their themes and popular plot devices, stock characters and visual

Dramatic Comedy: A History of European and American Plays humor. The plays were fairly simple in structure: the scenario, or plot outline, was written without much embellishment, and the actors improvised their lines guided by these often farcical, often improbable situations. The plots were convoluted and the characters exaggerated; people came to see them plunged into the strangest of situations. Visited by the courtesans and men of rank in disguise, the commedia dell’arte eventually developed a wide repertory, and its influence spread throughout Europe and into other art forms. Shakespeare, pantomime, and opera owe much to the characters and plots. It was an Italian, Francesco Robotello (1516–68), who wrote the first literary commentary on Aristotle. He opened the door for Italians to revive Greek and Roman traditions. It reawakened in Europe an interest in Aristotle’s Poetics. As directed by Aristotle, ‘‘neoclassical comedy’’ of the seventeenth century sought a more realistic form and coherent form of theater. Stressing verisimilitude, writers restricted characters from the middle or lower classes to comedy and a ‘‘superior’’ folk to tragedy. After debating and redefining the three unities of action, time, and place, they decided that a play needs a single plot, it should take place in less than twenty-four hours. and it must be situated in one place. The aim should be universal themes and moral lesson, imitating behavior that met the expectations of the audience and norms of nature. These Aristotelian rules were rigorously applied to both comedy and tragedy throughout Europe until prominent playwrights proved that the most realistic characters did not always act according to fixed type according to age, rank, and profession.

Shakespeare and Jonson William Shakespeare (1564–1616) and the Jacobean and Carolinian dramatists of the seventeenth century liberalized the Aristotelian unity of action by adding secondary subplots and redefining the unity of place to say that it would be valid still if characters could move easily from locale to locale. English dramatists generally observed the rules only when it was convenient. Shakespeare blurred the boundaries between comedy and tragedy as he mixed clowns and kings, pain and laughter, farce and death. Many of his so-called dark comedies or problem comedies such as Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well appear to be miscatalogued as comedy since they depict serious action and sometimes end with a strained truce. Shakespeare’s most outrageous characters such as Bottom in A Midsummer’s Night Dream or Shylock in A Merchant of Venice, who are both the wit and butt of the humor, meet their downfall and exit on a sober, even pitiful note. Even so, there is the feeling that the outliers have been welcomed to the fold. Marriage is generally the outcome. Although couples tend to pair off in a predictable pattern, true love is not their object, nor does it seem a likely outcome in some cases. Despite the tensions, Shakespeare’s comedies end with greater self-knowledge and understanding of the others, a reconciliation,

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Western Drama through the Ages communal harmony, and some measure of forgiveness. There is always hope in these plays. Shakespeare’s festive comedies are celebratory in tone, enabling movement toward release from restraint and dull burden. They too have been linked to Greek theater. These plays gently ridicule romance, killjoys, the trials of life, and pretentiousness, indeed anything that may be taken seriously. Shakespeare also used hilarious reversals and stock characters of traditional comedy as low humor in short scenes. He borrowed from commedia dell’arte for theatrical types such as the rustic clown, the drunkard, the pedant, the gullible father, and loose widow. Among the Elizabethan playwrights, Ben Jonson (1572–1637) was the most self-conscious adherent of the classical form. His popular comedies—The Alchemist, Volpone, and Bartholomew Fair—anticipate the moralistic theater of social commentary in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Rather than portray lovable rogues, as did Shakespeare, Jonson drew a harsher gallery of characters, whose failings call more for scorn and correction than admiration.

Molie`re French playwright Molie`re (1622–73) was known for his natural style, particularly for his individualistic characters in such plays as Le Misanthrope and Le Malade Imaginaire. He too moved away from the rigidities of neoclassical comedy to more closely mirror real life. No longer were comic figures drawn only from low life, but he skewered people of all ranks. His people are so realistic that they roused angry attack when audiences suspected that the actors represented actual individuals whose deviant behavior seemed recognizable. Even while aiming at a more truthful reflection of human nature, many of his works are farces in the tradition of the commedia dell’arte, and they remain generally faithful to the unities. His sharply drawn, complex comic characters, his satire on manner and custom, and his interior settings (rather than using the out-of-doors) raise the level of dramatic comedy from the mask and improvised theater of the commedia dell’arte to a new standard of polished and scripted works.

Restoration Comedy Restoration Comedy, a period of English drama which shortly followed Shakespeare’s time, made its mark with a comedy of manners, known for its sparkling dialogue, clever plot, and caricature of the upper classes. This is a world of intriguers, fops, fools, and foolish lovers. Since their smart mannerisms are exaggerated to highlight character, we cannot take them to be faithful pictures of the life of the people. Even so, there are large elements of reality and their behaviors seem to be portraits of the time. Among the best known playwrights of the comedy of manners were William Congreve (1670–1729) and William Wycherly (1640–1715).

Dramatic Comedy: A History of European and American Plays Much later came Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816) and Oliver Goldsmith (1730?–74). Their plays continue to be loved for their brilliantly witty scenes and flippant treatment of lovers who find themselves preoccupied with suggestive flirtation, seduction, arranged marriage, and moral laxity. This is not the buffoonery, sex, and adultery of Greek theater nor the crude farce of the commedia dell’arte, which relied on broad and unsubtle humor. It is high comedy that turns on grace and wit in its gentle satire of human foible and social pretension. A derivation of the comedy of manners is the comedy of intrigue in Spain and Italy with its intricate plots, artificial, contrived situations that are somewhat less engaging because the pieces lack the word play and shiny wit of the English.

European Comedy, 1700–1900 Much of the fare on the stages of the eighteenth and nineteenth century theater in both Europe and the United States was melodrama, which is usually marked by high contrast between good and evil and sensationalism, or burlesque, which an exaggerated form of ridicule either by treating a trivial subject with deep seriousness or by treating a dignified subject frivolously. One exception was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), which both parodied melodrama and painted a cynical picture of corruption in high places and a satire of the operatic form. Mixing popular music with dark comedy, The Beggar’s Opera is one of the earliest examples of musical theater and expression of the working-class condition. It had a heavy influence on twentieth century dramatists such as Bertolt Brecht who admired its nihilistic tone and emphasis on workers’ politics. The theater of Aristophanic political and social criticism reappears only sporadically through the centuries. The mystery plays, which toyed irreverently with a not-so-veiled criticism of the church and its leaders, and The Beggar’s Opera are examples. Lasting political satire, or work that uses ridicule to criticize or provoke change in human nature or institutions, did not thrive in English theater until the nineteenth century, when George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) gained the literary stature to stand up to the various levels of licensing in London. The Lord Chamberlain had virtually total authority to censor or shut down a play in the City of Westminster (London) that was offensive to the court. And Parliament could choose to remove the license of ‘‘theatres royal’’ in specific towns outside London. Even local magistrates had some authority for having control over the themes, mode, and language of entertainment. They often wielded their power arbitrarily and closed down plays without question. Shaw’s most important comedies are more serious than not. They are examples of high comedy which employs grace and wit to appeal to the intellect, downplaying emotion and affect. As a Fabian socialist, committed vegetarian, and nudist, Shaw prided himself in unmasking the hypocrisies of Victorians and mocking their illusions and cynicism. Shaw’s plays such as Arms and the Man and Major Barbara comment on the absurd

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Western Drama through the Ages myths we live by, in this case love and war and profit and war. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, and Pygmalion pose thorny questions about the treatment and roles of women. Because the Victorian theater was generally not prepared for a searching discussion of social problems, it is surprising that both Shaw and Oscar Wilde (1856–1900) enjoyed huge popularity in their time. Like Shaw, Wilde championed the rights and dignity of women in Lady Windemere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, and A Woman of No Importance. Wilde’s Importance of Being Ernest is recognized as one of the great plays of English comedy. The play’s avowed goal to ‘‘treat all the trivial things very seriously and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality’’ speaks for the comic tradition in England, which had been well honed over the years since the Restoration. Although the charm of these plays mitigated Wilde’s sarcasm, the public eventually turned against him for his flagrant disregard of social convention. In their own way, William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900) wrote some of the most enduring comedy of the last two centuries. Gilbert wrote the book and Sullivan composed the music for musicals that still enjoy a loyal following. Gilbert and Sullivan constructed the make-believe world of Topsy Turvey, where lighthearted melody evoked both nostalgia for the old British Empire and genial spoof of British institutions—self-important royalty (The Mikado), the gnarled legal system (Trial by Jury), feminists (Princess Ida), aristocratic rank (H. M. S. Pinafore), and upper middle class tastes—including the craze for Oscar Wilde and the ‘‘Aesthetes’’ (Patience). Most of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas feature contrived plots with cradle mix-ups and kinship recognition (borrowing a gimmick from the Greeks), the exaggeration of burlesque and a parody of operatic style and other subgenres.

European Comedy, Twentieth Century Noel Coward (1899–1973) also belongs to the group of socially aware playwrights, even though he had little interest in serious political satire. If anything, Coward’s plays about contemporary issues spanned the World Wars and were thus patriotic. Nevertheless he was heir to Shaw and Wilde’s penchant for caustic commentary on dubious human behavior, particularly in the battle between the sexes. Coward’s contribution to comedy is the twisted attitude of the urbane character who has little interest in sentiment or attachment. Men and women in Coward’s plays flaunt their premarital affairs, marry the wrong people, and swap partners. While antimarital English comedy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries similarly threatened social stability, they usually ended by reassuringly reestablishing the social order. Sheridan’s eighteenth century The School for Scandal, for example, reaffirmed marriage even if it suggested more discord to follow. Sometimes called ‘‘comedies of bad manners,’’ Coward’s The Vortex, Fallen

Dramatic Comedy: A History of European and American Plays Angels, and Private Lives shocked audiences that expected some affirmation of marriage values and conventional relationships, even if the couples went their own way. Licentious sentiments expressed in Coward’s plays once again recall the racier examples of Greek and Roman comedy. A more pointed political satire appeared in the 1960s in the United Kingdom in the form of Agit Prop, a sketch-like form of political theater that commented on the news of the day, and later, leftist theater that, post-World War II, protested the degradation of the environment, the myth of achieving class parity, a rejection of cold-war imperialism, and crude materialism. John McGrath (1935–2002) of the 7:84 Theatre Company and Caryl Churchill (b. 1938) are two playwrights who challenged assumptions about power and economic relationships. McGrath used folk forms such as the Scottish ceilidh, a celebration with song, dance, and ribald parody in The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil, to show how power corrupts and to demonstrate that the people could fight back with communal resistance. Churchill continues to write some of the most original comedy on the British stage. Her early work was with Monstrous Regiment, a feminist group that developed scripts out of workshopping through analysis, discussion, and experimentation. Cloud Nine linked economic imperialism and sexual imperialism in hilariously unexpected ways. Top Girls is an innovative feminist comedy about what women in power must give up. Radical comedy in the United States continues to be mounted by committed theater companies such as La Mama Experimental Theatre, San Francisco Mime Troupe, Marbou Mines, and Omaha Magic Theatre. The content of the theater of the absurd departed markedly from centuries of social satire and farcical comedy. It bewilders audiences, who cannot understand its antisocial nature and seemingly destructive philosophy. Its plays depict a strange and dislocated world in which ‘‘absurd’’ events confront and mystify the characters and the audience is forced to decide on meaning for themselves. Writers such as Samuel Beckett (1906–89), Euge`ne Ionesco (1909–1994), Va´clav Havel (b. 1936), Edward Albee (b. 1928), and Harold Pinter (b. 1930) retained traditional dramatic forms but rejected rational views of the universe. The theater of the absurd was probably suggested by Dadaism and a fascination with Jung’s and Freud’s investigations of dreams and neuroses, which they believed open windows on the recesses of the unconscious. Dada appeared around 1916 or 1918, when a number of visual artists independently responded to the massive destruction of World War I by creating non-art. European culture had lost all meaning. This nihilistic feeling spread with the spiritual exhaustion at the end of World War II, when they were forced to admit that the humanistic ideals of the Renaissance had been unable to prevent the holocaust and that they should stop pretending that the arts had something to say. About the same time, philosophers Martin Heidegger, Soren Kirkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre raised the ideas of

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Western Drama through the Ages existentialism. It grew into a loosely constructed philosophical movement that places a heavy emphasis on individual responsibility and living in the present according to a personally authenticated code of rules for existence. The movement came to its peak in Europe and the United States in the 1950s, a time of abstract expressionist painting, cold-war fear, rampant materialism, and mindless conformity. These trends informed a theater that neither preached nor proposed solutions but described things as they were in scathing metaphor. The comedy of the theater of the absurd is based on the ludicrous situations that lone characters, isolated from the world and reasoned interaction, must endure, since their stories almost never end happily. Without a past or a future, Beckett’s characters inhabit barren landscapes, some are trapped in isolated rooms, others are stuck in garbage cans or buried alive in a hole. They reject cliche´ and ideology. Pinter’s characters live in secret dread. In an interview with Kenneth Tynan, Pinter talked about the absurd, ‘‘Everything is funny; the greatest earnestness is funny; even tragedy is funny.. . .The point about tragedy is that it is no longer funny. It is funny, and then it becomes no longer funny.’’ In the theater of the absurd, comedy merges with tragedy once everything seems pointless and relative. These plays are darker than almost any before their time and they make a mockery of the lighthearted themes of comedy—romance, marriage, rogues and tricksters, and sex. This form of comedy is so turned on its head that barriers between the arts break down and one does not know whether to laugh or not.

AMERICAN COMEDIC THEATER America’s comedic theater began long after the Puritan era and developed more in the direction of popular entertainment than dramatic comedy. From the nineteenth century on, minstrel shows, vaudeville, medicine shows, and burlesque filled the stages more than serious comedy. Certainly, there was no author with the historical influence of a Shaw or a Shakespeare. Most American comedies are either straight farce or musical theater, comic in structure with laughter and comic endings, largely based on farce, or ‘‘dramatic pieces intended to excite laughter and depending less on plot and character than on improbable situations, the humor arising from gross incongruities, coarse wit, or horseplay.’’ George S. Kauffman (1889–1961) had the reputation of being one of the wittiest writers of his time. He collaborated with Moss Hart (1904–61) to create popular comedies of the 1930s and 1940s—The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can’t Take It With You. William Saroyan (1900–81) made his fame on likable characters. Neil Simon (b. 1927) similarly has written well-loved works—Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Brighton Beach Memoirs to name a few. Simon’s plays are largely romantic comedies, stories about couples who have ‘‘obstacles thrown up in the way of true love, but they usually end happily.’’ With a few exceptions, American

Dramatic Comedy: A History of European and American Plays comedy has found so much profit in farcical themes that it has done little to push the development of dramatic comedy into new directions. One exception is America’s ethnic theater, which has daringly taken on sensitive racial subject matter for two centuries. The humor works both ways—as the exploitation of stereotypes by mainstream culture and as disdain of power by ethnic groups. It has sprung from a variety of traditions. In the Native American theater, the comedy has been rooted for centuries in ritual ceremony and celebration. In the nineteenth century, ethnic theater was a cultural focus for immigrants. A popular topos was poking fun at the ‘‘green one,’’ the newcomer to the United States. Often mounted in the language of the community, these productions provided a reason for community. There was a well-established French theater in New Orleans in the early nineteenth century, a Yiddish theater for decades in New York City, Chicago-based Swedish companies, and Finnish companies in mining camps. Chinese theater flourished in San Francisco. Italian comedic theater came from an ages-old love of opera and the commedia dell’arte (Seller 1983). Protest theater reached its peak with the waves of immigrants in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries and with the African American Civil Rights Movement. An ongoing subject for ethnic humor is protest against exclusionary institutions and hypocritical attitudes in the mainstream. Ethnic theater continues to preserve folklore, educate the audience to values and community culture, provide a center for the social life, and entertain. August Wilson’s cycle plays covering African American twentieth century history is a fine example of this. One of the activist theaters today is the Chicano El Teatro Campesino. Originating in the 1965 grape-picking camps of the United Farm Workers, it traded on slapstick and a fast-paced form of comedy for protest and political satire. It has grown from improvisation to full-length plays and films. These multivalent forms of dramatic comedy have in common those various elements that make people laugh. From Aristotle on, a common view of comedy was that we find the protagonist funny as a deviant from the social norm. We enjoy feeling superior to the character. It is not enough to regard the poor buffoon as a moral inferior; some writers use his missteps as a reason for moral judgment and correction. This is particularly the case for stock figures that function as types. They sometimes stand for the aberrants that the dramatist can shape a play or scene against. Audiences enjoy the clueless, the rigid, the mechanical, and the outrageous as long as they are not to be pitied. Characters on the edge are funny because we become aware of the gap between them and ourselves. In short it is the proximity between disjunctive objects that is funny. In Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), he explores the idea of incongruity. He is especially interested in the joke as a signal from the unconscious to the conscious mind of difference. He speaks of the ‘‘comic process as necessarily an unconscious one,’’ attaching it to dreams and the ‘‘lost laughter of childhood.’’ He

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Western Drama through the Ages explains that we become aware of difference and we experience pleasure when we know it is not us. Freud was particularly aware of comedy as a social event and a release from fear. In The Gay Science (1882), Friedrich Nietzsche detached comedy from its judgmental and moral overtones, by arguing that the ideal human confronts seriousness as though it were the stuff of laughter. Had Nietzsche lived long enough, he might have endorsed the plays of the theater of the absurd because he saw humor as a way out of atrophying human behavior, as a way of producing new knowledge and disaggregating stultifying conventional values. Nietzsche contended that comedy was not only faultfinding, but exuberant and liberating, pleasurable because it is the playful spirit that puts one in touch with the divine.

FURTHER READING Barber, C.L. Shakeskpeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton University Press, 1959. Brockett, Oscar G. A History of the Theatre. 5th Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1987. Hockenson, Jan Walsh. The Idea of Comedy: History, Theory, Critique. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 2006. Holman, C. Hugh and William Harmon. A Handbook to Literature. 6th edition. Macmillan and Collier Publishing Companies, 1992. Itzin, Catherine. Stages in the Revolution: Political Theatre in Britain Since 1968. London: Eyre Methuen, 1980. Lauter, Paul, ed. Theories of Comedy. New York: Anchor Books, 1964. Seller, Maxine Schwartz. Ethnic Theatre in the United States. Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1983. Styan, J. L. The Dark Comedy: The Development of Modern Comic Tragedy. Cambridge University Press, 1968.


Expressionism Robert F. Gross

In a snow-covered landscape, a man watches as a leafless tree turns into a human skeleton.. . .To the clink of gold pieces, bankers in silk top hats dance the fox trot around the stock exchange.. . .A horde of creditors descend on a funeral procession and strip the corpse naked. . . .Expressionist drama abounds in images of great intensity, violence, raw sexuality, and grotesquerie. Yet these images rarely exist only to shock; they are usually put to the service of highly idealistic visions of a desperate need for social reform and spiritual regeneration in modern society. Rejecting realism, the dominant style of Western theater in the twentieth century, the expressionists responded with a theater of stylized speech, expansive gestures, dreamlike occurrences, masks, choral effects, music, choreographed movement, distorted settings, and innovative lighting techniques to evoke a world of almost unbearable intensity. First flourishing in Germany in the years during and immediately following World War I, both the vision and techniques of expressionist theater have reappeared, often as a form of social protest, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The term ‘‘expressionism’’ was not coined as the name of theatrical movement, nor did it ever denote a strictly defined coterie of theater artists who shared a single, unified aesthetic. The word was actually first applied to developments in the visual arts. Whereas the ‘‘impressionist’’ painters, including Claude Monet, Camille Pissaro, and Pierre Auguste Renoir, had moved their easels out of doors to catch the play of light and color more accurately, artists in the succeeding generation were often less interested in rendering the appearances of the outside world. They were more interested in the challenge of how to convey emotional states in visual form. These artists, including Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin,

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Western Drama through the Ages and Edvard Munch, embraced an artistic vision of radical subjectivity. Munch’s most famous work, ‘‘The Scream,’’ was, he explained, his attempt to communicate to the viewer his personal experience of feeling a ‘‘scream go through nature.’’ Not concerned with rendering the bridge perspectively, or catching the reflection of sunset on the water, or using the actual proportion of human hands in relationship to the head, or following the actual anatomy of the body, Munch uses line, color, shape, and composition to convey the particular intensity of his experience. In ‘‘The Scream,’’ the impression of the external world on the eye has given way to the expression of intense emotion through the artistic distortion of external phenomena.

THE BEGINNINGS OF EXPRESSIONISM IN DRAMA Strindberg In the theater, the beginnings of expressionism can be seen in the work of Swedish playwright August Strindberg (1849–1912). A prolific and relentless experimenter, his works contain instances of almost every style of modern theater: realism, symbolism, surrealism, neo-romanticism, absurdism—and expressionism. Strindberg gained fame and notoriety as the author of plays that still stand among the masterpieces of naturalism, including The Father (Vadren, 1887) and Miss Julie (Frøken Julie, 1888). His fascination, however, with intense human drives and his belief that strong personalities can seize and control the minds of weaker individuals—even to the point of committing ‘‘psychic murder’’ by the mere power of suggestion—led Strindberg to portray psychic forces at work on the stage. A series of psychotic episodes between 1894 and 1896, accompanied by a conversion to religious mysticism, further opened his dramaturgy to the representation of subjective states. In his trilogy, To Damascus (Till Damaskus, Parts 1 and 2, 1898; Part 3, 1904), he presents a visionary autobiographical drama of his movement toward religious belief. He dramatizes his spiritual quest in a series of disjointed, dreamlike episodes. In one, a boyhood rival appears as the husband of the woman he loves, and as the superintendent of a mental hospital. In another, a formal banquet held in his honor mysteriously degenerates into a sordid event attended by beggars and prostitutes. Strindberg’s episodic depiction of his spiritual journey became known as Stationendrama, or ‘‘station play,’’ after the Catholic devotional practice of the Stations of the Cross, a series of fourteen episodes depicting the suffering, death, and entombment of Jesus. The Stationendrama became a major form of expressionist drama. Presenting himself as ‘‘The Stranger,’’ Strindberg encounters such representative types as ‘‘The Lady,’’ ‘‘The Confessor,’’ ‘‘The Beggar,’’ and ‘‘The Madman.’’

Expressionism Stripped of proper names, and presented as types rather than detailed, realistic characters, these figures often seem to be aspects of The Stranger’s psyche, much as they might appear in dreams. The tendency to prefer types over individualized characters became one of the most salient aspects of expressionist dramaturgy. In A Dream Play (Ett Dro¨mspel, 1902), Strindberg took his experiments in transformation even further, creating a play in which ‘‘anything can happen; anything is possible and probable.’’ The daughter of the god Indra descends to an earth in which everything has the fluidity of a dream and the sole constant is human suffering. Characters move freely across time and space; a castle grows like a plant and, as it is consumed in flames at the final curtain, it bursts into flower, with a huge chrysanthemum at its top. This experimentation with the theater as a place of continual, imaginative transformation would become an important part of American expressionism in the 1960s and 1970s. In The Ghost Sonata (Spo¨ksonaten, 1907), Strindberg strips away the veneer of an apparently happy and respectable middle-class household to find it a den of madness, sin, and betrayal, inhabited by a mummy, a vampire, and a beautiful young woman who is mysteriously wasting away. The barrier between life and death becomes insubstantial; a recently deceased consul watches himself being mourned from the balcony of his home. From what he observes in the house, an idealistic student concludes that Jesus’s descent into hell was in fact his descent into the madhouse of our world. Although Strindberg’s experimental dramas were not accepted at first, they slowly established themselves, and then became wildly successful in Germany after his death. Between 1913 and 1915, twenty-four of his plays were performed in sixty-two German cities, racking up more than a thousand performances. Strindberg’s plays continue to be revived and have attracted the attention of such notable directors as Max Reinhardt, Evgeny Vakhtangov, Olof Molander, Ingmar Bergman, and Robert Wilson.

Early Expressionism in German Drama Spiritual yearning is replaced by cynicism and satire in the plays of Frank Wedekind (1864–1918), the other major precursor of expressionism. An iconoclast disgusted by sexual repression and prudery, he wrote Spring’s Awakening (Fru¨hlingserwachen) in 1891 but had to wait until 1906 for its premiere, even in a heavily censored version. By turns lyrical and grotesque, the play presents a group of adolescents struggling to reach adulthood in a rigid, hypocritical, and brutally repressive society. Wedekind fractured his dramatic action into a series of intense episodes, some of which deal with masturbation, homosexuality, sexual violence, and abortion—all strictly taboo subjects on the German stage of that era. In the final and most dreamlike scene, Melchior, the young protagonist, finds

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Western Drama through the Ages himself in a cemetery, where he encounters a school friend who had committed suicide by shooting himself. Carrying his head in his hands, the friend tries to persuade Melchior to join him in death, only to be defeated by a rebuttal from the mysterious ‘‘Man in a Mask,’’ who represents the forces of life. Wedekind’s Lulu, published and performed in two parts, entitled Earth Spirit (Erdgeist, 1895) and Pandora’s Box (Die Bu¨chse der Pandora, 1904), is a sort of perverse, erotic Stationendrama. In it, Lulu survives three husbands—the first dies of a stroke when he finds her in the arms of an artist; the second cuts his throat when he learns of her sexual past, and the third, driven insane by her many admirers, is shot by Lulu herself. Fleeing both the police and a blackmailer, she dies in a London slum, murdered by Jack the Ripper. Not a scheming femme fatale, Lulu is a strangely innocent figure whom Wedekind uses to show up the hypocrisy, possessiveness, and emotional insecurity of the men who flock around her. As with Spring’s Awakening, the Lulu plays offended the censors, and it was not until 1989 that Wedekind’s original text was performed. Dissatisfied with the early performances of his plays, Wedekind, an accomplished cabaret performer, took to the stage himself. Rejecting both the smooth, declamatory style of the classical school of acting and the understated, psychologically based style of the realists, Wedekind created his own powerfully idiosyncratic style. His harsh, grating voice, lurching movements, high energy and abrasive presence, dominated the productions of his plays and fascinated audiences. He became a model for the coming generation of expressionist performers in Germany. Wedekind’s attacks on sexual repressiveness and bourgeois gentility appealed to the anti-establishment—even anarchistic—sensibility of many German expressionists, who celebrated the power of life over tradition and social convention. In a 1906 manifesto, expressionist painter Ernst Kirchner defined the goal of attracting ‘‘all the revolutionary and surging elements. . .and. . .to create. . .freedom of life and movement against the long-established older forces,’’ and many of his contemporaries in literature and theater concurred. Artist Oskar Kokoschka’s playlet, Murder, Hope of Women (Mo¨rder, Hoffnung der Frauen), first produced in Vienna in 1909, is considered the first true expressionist drama. Performed outdoors at night after the briefest of rehearsals by Kokoschka’s fellow art students, it caused a sensation and led its author to lose the academic stipend that paid for his schooling. The play’s mythic structure, minimal dialogue, violent physicalizations and extreme compression (the script is only five pages long), distilled the dramatic action into a single shockwave unlike anything in the plays of Strindberg and Wedekind. The play presents a duel-to-the-death between ‘‘Man’’ and ‘‘Woman,’’ who are locked in a demonic struggle for dominance, complete with branding and stabbing. It climaxes in the ecstatic death of Woman and a violent surge of energy

Expressionism from Man, who strides through the terrified chorus and ‘‘kills them like mosquitoes and leaves red behind.’’ Kokoschka painted muscles, nerves, and veins on the faces and bodies of the performers, suggesting a primal world of tortured physicality and flayed sensibilities. Far more influential, and more representative of early expressionist drama than Murder, Hope of Women is Reinhard Sorge’s The Beggar (Der Bettler; published 1912, premiered 1917), which adopts the form of Stationendrama to tell the story of a young artist’s development. Instead of Strindberg’s questioning pilgrims, however, Sorge’s protagonist is a young firebrand who realizes his poetic vocation with no self-doubt and little opposition from others. Plot and conflict are reduced to a minimum, and the hero often expresses the stages of his spiritual journey in long, declamatory speeches. The protagonist (variously referred to as ‘‘the Poet,’’ ‘‘the Brother,’’ ‘‘the Young Man,’’ and ‘‘the Son,’’ as well as ‘‘the Beggar’’ of the title) is the embodiment of all that Sorge finds noble: youth, idealism, creativity, and an unremitting dedication to his vision. He is the first of many examples of the expressionist figure of ‘‘The New Man’’— a prophetic, sometimes even Messianic figure who represents the values of a utopian future. Often, the New Man is called upon to annihilate the unenlightened status quo in the figure of his father. In The Beggar, the poet’s father—a demented invalid with fantastic dreams of economic development on Mars—is poisoned by the hero in response to his father’s entreaties. The idea of euthanasia provokes neither ethical conflict nor legal consequences for the son: an example of Sorge’s predilection for lyrical abstraction over dramatic suspense and tension. Sorge’s strategy is not to sustain dramatic interest through conflict, but through the lyric evocation of the poet’s visionary existence. Early expressionist dramas were often called Schreidramen, or ‘‘scream plays,’’ summoning up the shattering intensity of Edvard Munch’s pictorial idea. Intensity, whether elicited by sex, violence, mob experience, or spiritual ecstasy, was set in opposition to the values of middle-class culture. Playwrights experimented with ways of heightening language—whether rhapsodic, free-verse declamations, or short, telegraphic bursts of speech—and the elements of production were used to further boost the emotional effect. Actors were encouraged to stretch their physical and vocal resources to the utmost, and exaggerate vocal contrasts through unexpected shifts in volume, tempo, and rhythm. Claw-like hands, rolling eyes, bared teeth, and trancelike declamations became familiar elements in the expressionist actors’ arsenal of techniques. The aim was less to create a character than to channel primal emotional states in all their unadulterated power. The scream, breaking through the social codes of language with its raw intensity, was not only an image for how expressionists saw their art, but was sometimes a key moment in their productions. In Karl-Heinz Martin’s production of Ernst Toller’s Transfiguration (Die Wandlung, 1919), wounded and mutilated soldiers complained of their sufferings individually, then screamed in unison,

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Western Drama through the Ages bringing the groaning nurses in the ward to their knees—a moment that left some members of the audience in tears. In Ernst Barlach’s The Deluge (Die Suy¨akndflut, 1924), we hear from offstage the repeated screams of a shepherd whose hands have been chopped off in a deliberate gesture of provocation to both the humans and deity who fail to intervene in such atrocities. At first the provocative themes and aggressive style of expressionist drama kept many of them off the stage, and they were often published in literary journals long before they were performed. In 1916 Dresden became the scene of the first professional production of an expressionist drama: Walter Hasenclever’s The Son (Der Sohn). Another treatment of the popular theme of the son’s violent revolt against patriarchy, The Son shows a youthful protagonist who is under virtual house arrest and physically abused by his tyrannical father. Breaking free under the mesmerizing influence of his friend (named ‘‘the Friend’’), he brings an offstage audience to a frenzy as he recounts the story of his oppression and displays his scars—a true Schrei performance. Returning home with a pistol, he intends to kill his father. But before he can shoot, the oppressor drops dead of a stroke. Other expressionist dramatists would continue to ring changes on the theme of father-son conflict. In Anton Wildgans’s Dies Irae, the confrontation ends with the son’s death. In Arnolt Bronnen’s notoriously sensational (and very successful) Patricide (Vatermord, written 1916, published 1920, performed 1922), the son, who is incestuously involved with his mother, murders his father and then, repudiating his sexually overstimulated mother’s advances, soars into the heavens.

TWENTIETH CENTURY GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM The outbreak of World War I soon forced many writers to widen their purview beyond domestic battles. Although some expressionists at first welcomed the war as a relief from the monotonous constraints of bourgeois life, the horrors of the battlefield, trench warfare, and poison gas quickly disabused them of any naive illusions. Some perished in the war, including August Stramm (1874– 1915), Reinhard Sorge (1892–1916) and Gustav Sack (1885–1916). Others, including Fritz von Unruh (1885–1975) and Ernst Toller (1843–1939), survived and wrote plays from a pacifist perspective. Toller’s Transfiguration chronicled the playwright’s own conversion from nationalist, pro-war fervor to committed pacifism. Among other notable pacifist plays: Georg Kaiser’s The Burgers of Calais (Die Bu¨rger von Calais, written 1914; performed 1917) Hasenclever’s Antigone (1917), and Reinhard Goering’s Naval Encounter (Seeschlacht, 1917). In Naval Encounter, Goering rejects the formal expansiveness of Stationendrama, achieving intensity by having the play unfold in one uninterrupted act in a single place—the gun turret of a battleship at sea. Their identities minimized by their combat functions, the sailors have no names, and are simply numbered

Expressionism from 1 to 7. Hardened by their work, they wait anxiously for the enemy to appear. Only Sailor 5 realizes what has happened to them: For two years we have wandered the sea, Blind and obsessive, killing, finding death Nobody remembers anything else No one knows anything else No one can do anything else But killing and dying.

He tries to rally his shipmates to mutiny, but suddenly enemy ships are sighted and the intensity of combat is irresistible—he plunges into battle with the others. Further deindividualized in their gas masks, they become indistinguishable from each other, and all meet their deaths in the frenzy of battle. Only in the last moments of his life does Sailor 5 realize how he has been unable to sustain his vision of a better world. Goering dramatizes the exhilarating intensity of warfare, its horrors, and a tragic dichotomy between group experience and individual reflection. Sailor 5 possesses all the visionary intensity and idealism of the New Man, but lacks the ability to convert others to his enlightened beliefs; even worse, he is incapable of sustaining his own idealism against opposing forces. This disillusionment with the prophetic hero can be seen increasingly in later expressionist dramas, along with an increasingly pessimistic vision of contemporary life. No longer is bourgeois repressiveness the enemy, but the increasing dehumanization brought about by modern industrialism, militarism, and urban life. Although the early expressionist plays of Georg Kaiser (1878–1945) expressed hope in the coming of the New Man, his later work often gave way to despair. In his Gas trilogy, composed of The Coral (Die Koralle, 1917), Gas I (1918) and Gas II (1920), the workers in the gas factory are not only without proper names; they have been reduced to their function in the industrial process. The man who operates the lever all day is seen as nothing but a hand; the man who works the pedal, a foot; the man who watches the gauge, an eye. But when the New Man, in the person of the factory’s idealistic owner, tries to persuade them to reject this perilous and dehumanizing work in favor of an agrarian idyll, they refuse, and the control of the factory is seized by the government, citing its importance to the national defense. In Gas II, the situation has worsened, and the factory runs unceasingly to produce gas for the war between the Blues and the Yellows. When the workers are encouraged to use the latest invention—poison gas—to insure their victory, the great-grandson of the owner opposes them: ‘‘Let the kingdom arise which shall reign in you almighty,’’ he desperately entreats them. But when he finds that the masses are intent on this suicidal course of mass destruction, he releases the poison that brings on the final destruction of civilization. The trilogy ends with

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Western Drama through the Ages the factory in ruins, the bleached skeletons of the workers scattered about, and bombs exploding in the distance. The implications of this apocalyptic ending are ambiguous, and have been debated by critics. Is Kaiser dramatizing a set of disturbing possibilities that he nevertheless believes can be avoided? Or is he expressing his own nihilistic loathing and despair? Certainly Kaiser deeply doubted the possibility of collective enlightenment by this point in his career. In The Coral his protagonist observes, ‘‘the deepest wisdom is found only by a single mind. And when it is found it is so overwhelming that it cannot become affective.’’ The despairing tone of the Gas trilogy is an example of the widespread disillusionment to be found in German expressionist drama of the last years of World War I and its aftermath. A similar disillusionment can be seen in Ernst Toller’s writing. His first play, Transfiguration, celebrates the education both of its hero and the masses. His later and most famous work, however, replaces that hopefulness with a tragic awareness of guilt and defeat. Written in prison, where Toller was serving a five-year sentence for his participation in the short-lived communist government in Bavaria, Man and the Masses (Masse-Mensch, 1921) shows its idealistic heroine opposing both her bourgeois, politically conservative husband and the revolutionary violence of The Nameless One. Despite her devotion to pacifism, she capitulates in the face of passionate revolutionary rhetoric, and much like Goering’s Sailor 5, is swept away by the intensity of violent action. When the revolution fails, and she is imprisoned, she realizes the extent of her guilt and refusing the attempts of both her husband and The Nameless One to free her, accepts her death sentence as an act of principle. The increasingly desperate vision of German expressionism in its final phases has led to its being dubbed ‘‘black expressionism,’’ reaching extremes of physical torment and anguished introspection in the works of Hans Henny Jahnn (1894– 1959), the last important German playwright to emerge from the movement. In his first published play, the seven-hour Pastor Ephraim Magnus (1919), two sons of a highly unorthodox minister follow two different paths to fulfillment, both of them grisly. One becomes a sex killer who dismembers a woman’s body in the hopes of finding her soul. The other, submitting to blinding, mutilation, castration, and crucifixion at the hands of his sister, does so in imitation of Jesus who, we are told, takes ‘‘all sufferings upon himself without finding salvation.’’ This controversial work was condemned as the artless ravings of a sick and obscene imagination by some, and praised by others for its unremitting exploration of spirituality in a world cut off from the possibility of redemption. Although awarded the prestigious Kleist Prize in 1920, Pastor Ephraim Magnus had to wait until 1923 for its drastically shortened stage premiere in a private Berlin club, only to be closed by the authorities before the week was out.

Expressionism Jahnn gained more popular success with his Medea (1926), one of the few German expressionist dramas to enjoy successful revivals in recent years. Jahnn makes the mythic heroine a woman of color, her children by Jason biracial, and uses her tragedy to explore the dilemma of the racial outsider in Western culture. Even here, Jahnn does not hesitate to explore areas of violence and taboo sexuality; Jason is a cynical hedonist, a promiscuous bisexual who admits to finding his own sons more sexually appealing than his wife, and Medea kills her sons while they are having sex together. With Jahnn, we reach both an extremity of content and a bleakness of vision that marks the end of expressionist experimentation. In the second half of the 1920s, Toller increasingly turned to realism; Hasenclever, to comedy; and the prolific and indefatigable Kaiser, while occasionally returning to expressionism, produced an array of comic satires, mystical romances, and libretti. Overall, the emotional rawness of expressionism gave way to the distance of the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), another loosely defined movement characterized by a renewed interest in realistic depictions of life, through usually from an ironic and decidedly unsentimental perspective. Marieluise Fliesser (1901–74) and ¨ do¨n von Horva´th (1901–38 ) explored the hypocrisies and viciousness of life in O small towns and big-city neighborhoods, and Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) developed a highly influential approach to political drama based on an aesthetic of emotional detachment.

Expressionism’s Decline By the time the Nazis came to power, expressionism had ceased to be a vital movement. Many of the plays were officially condemned and production of them forbidden. Some erstwhile expressionists, like Arnolt Bronnen and Hanns Johst (1890–1978), reworked their style and vision to become successful Nazi playwrights. Others, including Toller, Kaiser, Jahnn and Hasenclever, went abroad. After World War II, there was little interest in reviving expressionism, though Jahnn continued with his anguished intensities, and Wolfgang Borchert’s successful radio play, The Outsider (Draußen vor der Tu¨ r, 1947) used expressionist techniques in a story of a traumatized soldier’s return from the war. The legacy of German expressionism to the modern theater is not limited to the works of its playwrights, but to the innovations of its directors and designers as well. In fact, the long-term influence of the movement has actually been greatest in the area of theatrical production. At first directors often did not know how to approach these experimental scripts. The impact of The Son’s 1916 Dresden premiere, for example, was severely hampered by its director, Adolf Licho, who approached it as a realistic piece and neglected its Schrei intensity. It would not be until two years later, in Mannheim, that director Richard Weichert developed

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Western Drama through the Ages a production style that suited Hasenclever’s text. Stripping the scenery back to minimal groups of furniture in a surround of black draperies, Weichert placed the Son stage center beneath a harsh light, while the other characters entered through the darkness and addressed him from the shadowy periphery. Without stage makeup, the actors appeared spectral figures in an internal drama, rather than in a social drama in the style of Ibsen. Strongly cast with expressionist actors and visually compelling, this production of The Son met with critical and popular success. Weichert was one of a number of directors who discovered that the best way to present the intense, interior world of expressionist drama was to remove any superfluous details in the staging, sometimes simplifying the productions far beyond the playwright’s own stage directions. In 1921, designer Hans Storbach simplified the settings of Man and the Masses to a flight of stairs and a few emblematic props, enabling director Ju¨rgen Fehling to create arresting, nonrealistic images with the actors: a clerk on an exaggeratedly high stool at an equally high desk; an enclosure like a birdcage held the crouching heroine in her imprisonment. As in Weichert’s production of The Son, shafts of light pierced the darkness, and the design made much of the compositional possibilities of bright light and deep shadow. Most importantly, however, Fehling choreographed the crowd scenes to give the sense of the collective having a force and volition far beyond any single individual. Well-documented and reported, Fehling’s staging of Man and the Masses was the single most influential expressionist production abroad. The most celebrated advocate of this new scenic austerity was Leopold Jessner, who became famous for reducing scenery to a bare flight of ascending steps and platforms, or, as they are called to this day, ‘‘Jessnertreppen’’ (Jessner-steps). On these staircases, the actors were costumed in bright colors, arranged in striking compositions, and often sharply outlined by harsh lighting. The effect of taking them out of a realistic milieu was to stress the timeless, mythic dimension of the action. Not only did Jessner stage new plays in this style, but returned to classic texts as well, including Othello, Macbeth, and Richard III. Richard’s rise to power, for example, was reflected in his gradual ascent of the Jessnertreppen, climaxing in his coronation, as he stood at the top of the stage, the steps beneath him and his subjects all in red. After this, he descended, finally falling down the steps to be killed by Richmond’s soldiers, clad in white. Not all playwrights, however, were pleased with Jessner’s ascetic style. When Jessner undertook the premiere of Ernst Barlach’s The Genuine Sedemunds (Die echten Sedemunds, 1920), the playwright, himself a celebrated sculptor, showed the director the real-life locations that had inspired the play’s settings, only to find that the production did away with all of them. Frustrated that Jessner had ignored the specific demands of the script in favor of his own celebrated mise-en-sce´ne, Barlach avoided seeing subsequent productions of his plays.

Expressionism Using stark and sometimes distorted scenery, bright colors, the full force of electric lighting against deep shadows, and powerful stage compositions, the experiments of expressionist directors and designers created a harsh, intense aesthetic that expressed both the trauma and alienating impersonality of contemporary life. In so doing, they expanded the stylistic vocabulary of the modern theater. Moreover, expressionist theater often foregrounded the director’s contribution, leading to productions in which the director’s vision of the script became more hotly debated than the merits of the script or the performers. The ‘‘director’s theater’’ of today is deeply indebted to these innovators of the 1920s.

GERMAN EXPRESSIONISM’S INFLUENCE ON U.S. DRAMA The experiments of the German expressionists influenced theatrical production throughout Europe, but had their greatest influence in the United States. The Theatre Guild and the Provincetown Players, two producing organizations alert to European developments, brought expressionist plays to the New York stage— to decidedly mixed reviews but great interest, especially among the theatrical community. In 1922, the Theatre Guild presented Georg Kaiser’s From Morn to Midnight (Von Morgens bis Mitternachts, 1916), followed by Man and the Masses in 1924, and Franz Werfel’s Goat Song (Bockgesang, 1921) in 1926. The Provincetown Players staged Strindberg’s The Ghost Sonata in 1924 and Hasenclever’s Beyond (Jenseits, 1920) the following year. But probably no single stage production equalled the influence of Robert Wiene’s silent film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari, 1919). With its distorted, strangely angled scenery, shadowy lighting, grotesquely made-up actors, and the trancelike performance of Conrad Veidt as Cesare the sonnambulist, its 1921 New York showing brought a taste of expressionism to viewers who could not see experimental productions in Germany. Playwright Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) found the film a revelation, and it inspired him in his experiments with expressionist devices in the 1920s and early 1930s. By the time expressionism had begun to make its influence felt on the American stage, however, World War I was over; the plays’ protests seemed pointless and their visionary hope for regeneration, passe´. American expressionism was less concerned with the ecstatic and revolutionary than it was with the sociological and psychological. The anonymity of the big city and the impersonality of the workplace became major themes, nowhere more clearly than in Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine (1923), with its cipher protagonist, Mr. Zero, an accountant locked in a meaningless life with his nagging wife, surrounded by other, equally vapid couples. The New Man was replaced by the Neurotic. More pathologized than prophetic, the hysterical and sexually repressed heroines of Sophie Treadwell’s

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Western Drama through the Ages Machinal (1928) and Rice’s The Subway (1929), and the split personalities of Eugene O’Neill reflected the influence of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung in American artistic circles. O’Neill used a number of devices to dramatize the split psyche: masks in The Great God Brown (1925), lengthy asides in Strange Interlude (1928), and two actors presenting opposed sides of a single self in Days without End (1933). Although the form of the Stationendrama was assimilated to American expressionism, it was not used to dramatize a spiritual quest, but a process of psychological deterioration. Rice’s Mr. Zero is jolted out of his colorless existence and murders his boss; Treadwell’s Young Woman is driven to kill her coarse husband; both are sent to the electric chair. The protagonist of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) loses every bit of his self-possession and rationality as he flees into a jungle during an uprising, and Yank, the protagonist of O’Neill’s most fully realized foray into expressionism, The Hairy Ape (1921), finds himself an outcast among humans and finally seeks companionship with the gorilla in the zoo, only to be crushed to death. Both Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) and Sophie Treadwell (1885–1970) extended the range of expressionism by using it to explore feminist concerns. Although Glaspell’s The Verge (1921) is mostly realistic, its fascinating second act, set in a shadowy, Caligari-esque tower, uses distorted scenery and exaggerated characters to convey the dilemma of a brilliant female scientist who is hemmed in on all sides by conventional thought. Treadwell’s Machinal uses broken, telegraphic language to communicate the emotionally brutal, sexually exploitative world of the office that drives the Young Woman into an unfulfilling marriage, and eventually to murder. A critical success in its day, Machinal has enjoyed major revivals in London and New York over the past decade, as well as a renewed stage life on many college campuses. No doubt the most commercially successful and influential work of American expressionism, however, was a comedy. George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly’s Beggar on Horseback (1924), played the attack on the bourgeoisie for laughs. A free adaptation of an obscure German original, the play used expressionist devices ingeniously. An aspiring but impoverished composer falls asleep. In his dream, he imagines marrying an idiotic heiress (who carries a bridal bouquet of banknotes) in a jazz ceremony celebrated in a railway station. When she destroys his symphony, he murders her and her obnoxious family, finds himself in a trial conducted as a theatrical performance, and is condemned to a prison in which artists are sentenced to turn out appallingly banal commercial work. Fortunately, of course, it is all a dream, and the composer awakes to find his true love waiting for him. Expressionist devices have been assimilated into a Broadway romantic comedy, complete with whimsical touches, a sentimental love story, and a happy ending. By containing expressionism within the framework of a realistic,

Expressionism commercial play, Kaufman and Connelly achieved its domestication, opening the way to the insipid dream ballet of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! (1943) and its countless imitators, and the overproduced, cloying fantasies of Moss Hart’s Christopher Blake (1946), which depicts the daydreams of a boy facing his parents’ impending divorce. Expressionism, which had begun as a radical protest decades earlier, was safely assimilated on Broadway, and degenerated into cliche´. Broadway’s poetic realists of the 1940s and 1950s occasionally used expressionist devices to heighten dramatic moments or add imagistic touches. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) is fundamentally realistic, but the appearances of Willy’s dead uncle, his boss’s unnerving Dictaphone, and the dreamlike aura of certain episodes are all indebted to expressionism. Similarly, in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), the playwright uses the ghostly playing of the ‘‘Varsouviana’’ and the sound of a gun firing to underscore how Blanche is tormented by memories of her husband’s suicide. Both plays remain, however, fundamentally realistic in their treatment of behavior, plot, and setting.

THE REVIVAL OF EXPRESSIONISM The rediscovery of the expressionist impulse in the theater did not come about until the 1960s—and then through an unexpected source. The French theatrical visionary Antonin Artaud (1896–1949) seems not to have been directly influenced by the expressionists— his primary contacts were with the French surrealists— but he shared their enthusiasm for the plays of Strindberg, staging A Dream Play in 1928, and his proposals for a ‘‘theatre of cruelty,’’ which would break through daily life with a shattering intensity resonate with the visions of the expressionists. Although he eschewed the literary language that of the German playwrights, he shared their fascination with choreography, rhythmic incantation, and the mythic, often violent perspectives of Kokoschka, Bronnen, and Jahnn. As Artaud’s writings grew more influential in the theater of the 1960s, an aesthetic developed that, although not calling itself ‘‘expressionist,’’ nevertheless has much in common with it. In the United States, this revival has been centered in the experimental theaters of Off-Off Broadway. The counterculture of the 1960s embraced the impulse to revolt against the status quo that had galvanized the German bohemians decades earlier. The highly influential Living Theatre rediscovered both the raw emotions and anarchic-pacifist philosophy that had inspired many expressionists. The unrelenting intensity of Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, performed by the collective in 1963, with its characters reduced to numbers, evoked the dehumanization of Naval Encounter and Gas, while simplifying the language beyond anything to be found in the plays of Goering and Kaiser. Realistic motivation and causal

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Western Drama through the Ages plotting were completely discarded in later pieces such as Paradise Now and Frankenstein (both 1968), in which actors embodied impulses, rather than portrayed characters. In the latter, the head of Frankenstein’s monster became a world prison in which fugitives were imprisoned merely for being alive. Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre used larger-than-life puppets and masked figures to create powerful works of social protest. Joseph Chaikin (1935–2003), originally a member of the Living Theatre, used the transformational aesthetics of Strindberg’s A Dream Play in his own dreamlike, often mythic work, although his pieces rarely aimed at the intensity of expressionism. In the 1990s, gay playwright and director Reza Abdoh (1963–95) created dense works of violent, often assaultive imagery drawn from contemporary life and popular culture, as in The Law of Remains (1992), in which the life of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is filmed by Andy Warhol. Abdoh said the play aimed to remind its audience ‘‘That it’s not enough to think of a world that is more livable. . .but that you have to act on it.’’ In England, where expressionism had had little influence between the two World Wars, a theater with many expressionist elements has developed since the late 1960s. The plays of Edward Bond (b. 1934) fuse utopian impulses with denunciations of violence in intense, haunting works of nonrealistic theater. The cannibalism of Early Morning (1968), the blinding of Lear and torture of Gloucester in Lear (1972), and the apocalyptic landscapes of the War Plays (1985) blend shock and polemic in a manner reminiscent of expressionism. Bond has had a major influence on younger British playwrights, most notably on Howard Barker (b. 1946) a prolific playwright who calls his provocative explorations of the politics of desire, accompanied by dense, poetic language ‘‘The Theatre of Catastrophe.’’ Barker, in turn, influenced Sarah Kane (1971–99), whose Blasted (1995), a nightmarish drama that includes onstage masturbation, fellatio, rape, blinding, and cannibalism, produced a journalistic furor that easily equalled (if not surpassed) the controversy that surrounded plays by Wedekind, Bronnen, and Jahnn decades earlier. Kane explained that her play was an investigation of male psychology in the contemporary world, which leads not only to rapes in hotel rooms, but to rape camps in Bosnia. She insisted, however, that Blasted was a play about hope, since it shows people trying to continue in circumstances that could easily drive one to despair. In December 2004, the International WOW Company, a multicultural troupe of artists based in Thailand and the United States, presented a new play, written and directed by Josh Fox, at the Ohio Theatre in Manhattan. The Expense of Spirit opened to a loud surge of minimalist music as an actor noisily chopped (invisible) vegetables on a clattering metal platter. Marty, the boisterous owner of a vast video store, prepares to host her annual Christmas Eve dinner, while waiting for news of her daughter, stationed with the U.S. military forces in Iraq. Shortly before

Expressionism the party begins, Marty learns her daughter has died but tells no one, and the party goes on as planned. Increasingly loud and frenzied, the grotesque guests move in slow motion one moment, and lurch into a jerky, ‘‘fast-forward’’ the next, growing ever more drunken, gluttonous, and gross. As Marty, actor Deborah Wallace, moving with incredible tension and aggressiveness, hit a high level of intensity early on, and then, astonishingly, surpassed it time and time again, creating an atmosphere of almost unendurable tension. Exploding in vulgar tirades of forced jubilation and rage, Wallace seemed both desperately anguished and indomitable. Then, after a sequence of seeming equanimity, Marty suddenly shoots herself, bringing the play to a jarring halt. In its nonrealistic devices, grotesque touches, aggressive aesthetic, sustained intensity, and antiwar message, The Expense of Spirit demonstrates the ongoing vigor, effectiveness, and urgency of the expressionist tradition.

FURTHER READING Kuhns, David F. German Expressionist Theatre: The Actor and the Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Patterson, Michael. The Revolution in German Theatre: 1900–1930. Boston: Routledge, 1981. Valgemae, Mardi. Accelerated Grimace: Expressionism in the American Drama of the 1920s. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972.

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‘‘In Yer Face’’ Theater: ‘‘Purely through Image’’ and the Collapse of Language Luc Gilleman

SARAH KANE’S BLASTED The Necessity of Violence In Blasted (1995), a soldier rapes a man, then sucks out and swallows his eyeballs. Later the mutilated rape victim digs up a dead baby and devours it. The play also features fellatio, anal penetration with a gun, onstage masturbation, micturition, and defecation. The Daily Mail in London called Blasted ‘‘a disgusting feast of filth.’’ Most journalists agreed. It was the first professionally produced play, at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, of an unknown young woman, Sarah Kane, who was then 23 years old. She was 28 when, in 1999, she overdosed on pills, was saved, only to hang herself a few days later in the lavatory of the hospital where she was being treated for depression. The newspaper people were understandably shocked and awed, and the critical reception of her plays changed accordingly. The evils of depression became the centerpiece of discussions; her play 4.48 Psychosis, written in 1999 and performed posthumously in 2000, was widely read as a sort of suicide note, and the violent imagery of her plays was suddenly no longer the result of an immature imagination but an artistic symbol of existential despair. Violence, especially when it seems gratuitous and excessive, guarantees audience response, though not always of the kind the playwright hopes for. Kane said of Blasted that it was ‘‘a shocking play, but only in the sense that falling down the

‘‘In Yer Face’’ Theater stairs is shocking—it’s painful and it makes you aware of your own fragility.’’ Violence, then, is supposed to heighten awareness. But it doesn’t always do so. The complexity of Blasted is often overlooked for the scenes of rape and cannibalism—just as Edward Bond’s Saved (1965) is remembered mainly as the play where a baby is stoned to death; Howard Brenton’s Romans in Britain (1980), as the play that features a scene of anal rape; and Anthony Neilson’s The Censor (1997), as the play where a woman defecates onstage. Violence and obscenity do not always stimulate thought; they often soak up any subtler meanings the plays might have. Serious and incontestably talented playwrights like Kane depict violence on stage because they feel it has become an unavoidable and crucial ingredient of any play that claims to be relevant for our time. After all, the twentieth century was the bloodiest one on count, with some 160 million people killed by stateorganized violence alone, victims of conflicting ideologies and the efficiency of technologically improved warfare. With this figure in mind, the drawing-room play seems eerily artificial. This occurred to Kane when in 1993 she was writing the hotel room scenes in Blasted, scenes featuring a couple’s private despair, and Bosnia was the site of indescribable atrocities: ‘‘I switched on the television,’’ Kane recalled. ‘‘Srebrenica was under siege. An old woman was looking into the camera, crying. She said, ‘Please, please, somebody help us. Somebody do something.’ I knew nobody was going to do a thing. Suddenly, I was completely uninterested in the play I was writing. What I wanted to write about was what I’d just seen on television.’’ Kane could have abandoned the fairly conventional, one-room play she had been working on for a kind of social documentary about the war in Bosnia. Instead, she kept the story about the abusive relationship between a jaded tabloid journalist and a naive young girl but in the second half ‘‘blasted’’ the room open and, with images of unparalleled violence, let the outside world flood in. The result was disorienting, but also powerful and deeply unsettling. As the box set collapses, the nightmare we all do our best to forget, rushes in. After September 11, 2001, a date that gave the term ‘‘global village’’ a sinister ring, a play like Blasted has become frighteningly relevant.

Theater of Disintegration Blasted is the result of a careful whittling down and condensing of long drafts containing comprehensive accounts of characters’ background and motivations. Only surface was allowed to remain, symptoms without authorial diagnosis—all this in conformance with a performance-based view of ‘‘experiential’’ theater that eschews narrative explication. There are no easily identifiable authorial comments in Blasted, keys to an interpretive unraveling of its perplexing events. Harold Pinter— himself a minimalist, well-known for his use of the pause, silence, ellipsis, non sequitur, and ambivalence—vigorously defended the play against its

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Western Drama through the Ages detractors. So did Edward Bond, whose dark and violent vision of humankind is closest to Kane’s. Blasted acknowledges its debt to both of these older playwrights with oblique references to Pinter’s The Birthday Party (1958) and The Dumb Waiter (1960) and to Bond’s Lear (1971), which, like Blasted is a grim rewriting of Shakespeare’s King Lear. Because, as Pinter would say, ‘‘there is no chorus in this play,’’ Blasted offers no interpretive closure. Spectators have to make inferences and establish connections at their own risk, decide what is serendipitous and what deliberate, wondering perhaps whether the author herself always knew what she was doing. As Kane admits, ‘‘writing my first play really was a process of groping about in the dark, making connections that I understood on an instinctive level but couldn’t (and didn’t want to) necessarily articulate.’’ Digressions about Cate’s love of soccer or dim references to Ian’s past as a secret agent may belong to a former vision of the play, traces of which the playwright failed to erase completely or deliberately included, to confuse rather than to clarify. Such trace elements, undeveloped and apparently unconnected references to an extraneous and not fully integrated reality, compel careful readers or spectators to develop ever more nuanced or comprehensive interpretations. Many, however, lose patience with the play, especially when, near the end, it disintegrates into a series of grotesquely violent, disconnected images, one of which includes Ian’s death, after which he implausibly returns back to life. Kane does not make it any easier on her audience when she insists that these episodes should not be staged as a nightmare or hallucination, but that they are ‘‘even more real’’ than the play’s realistic beginning. Violence and obscenity definitely stoked the critics’ anger, yet much of the derision the play provoked was undoubtedly caused by its refusal to allow the audience to connect all the dots and spell out a moral lesson. Kane said that she intended the title of her play to refer to the ‘‘blasted heath’’ where Lear is exposed to the tempest, to ‘‘cataracts and hurricanoes.’’ Though the phrase ‘‘blasted heath’’ occurs in Macbeth (1.3), a play that like Blasted is concerned with guilt, King Lear is indeed the more obvious model for the disintegration with which Kane’s play is concerned. Ian is a 45-year old tabloid journalist, a successful dirt raker, in poor health and obsessed with bad smells. In his view, the world ‘‘stinks,’’ but so does his own body, with a smell of decay that bathing cannot obliterate. With only one diseased lung left and all major organs on the point of failure, Ian lives daily with the thought of death, or ‘‘non-being,’’ as he calls it. Fearing death, he devotes himself to the frantic pursuit of elementary pleasures, though these have long ceased to be pleasurable and propel him towards the non-being he fears. As he lights a cigarette, swills gin, or hungrily devours slices of bacon, he is racked by spasms of pain. Equally painful are the dreary orgasms he relentlessly pursues through masturbation and rape. Ian’s life

‘‘In Yer Face’’ Theater revolves almost exclusively around excretion and ingestion, including the play’s very opening line: Ian:

I’ve shat in better places than this.

The opening lines, together with the direction that they are spoken in ‘‘a very expensive hotel room in Leeds—the kind that is so expensive it could be anywhere in the world,’’ reveal much of what we need to know about Ian and the major themes of the play. Ian’s curious association of the sanitary luxury of the room with defecation introduces the audience not only to one of his obsessions but also, more generally, to the scatological meaning of wealth: money, like excrement, is a great equalizer, reducing difference to sameness, quality to quantity, inalienable essences to a common denominator. While ‘‘Cate stops at the door, amazed at the classiness of the room,’’ Ian has long lost this capacity for wonder. In his jaded view of the world, all is endlessly exchangeable, valuable only in as far as it can be quickly and casually consumed. After tossing down the gin, he turns to the next source of pleasure. His habitual sexual scheming is hinted at by the non sequitur: ‘‘I stink. You want a bath?’’ Barely in the hotel room and reacquainted with his former girlfriend, he is already envisioning sharing a bath with her. After all, he has little time left: ‘‘Enjoy myself while I’m here’’ is his philosophy. Ian’s casual disdain for others, for foreigners (wog, Paki, nigger, coon, conker, Sooty, whodat), the mentally disabled (retard, spaz, joey), and homosexuals (lesbos, dyke, gash suckers, cocksuckers, queers), extends to Cate, a twenty-one year old with marked regressive tendencies. While she naively wonders what they are celebrating, the money he spent on the room, flowers, and champagne, is meant to buy him the pleasure of her sexual service. At the start of the next scene, the next day, the flowers are scattered, and Cate is bleeding and hurting. During the previous night, she has become the unwilling object of Ian’s violent sexual fantasies. But this is not yet another ‘‘beauty and the beast’’ story. Cate is not a Griselda, a symbol of saintly female compliance, or a Justine, the ever white slate of female innocence on which masculine abuse can ceaselessly write itself afresh. She gives as well as she takes, seducing Ian at one point only so that, in revenge, she can bite him where it hurts most. She also learns and adapts quickly. When the room is inexplicably and implausibly transposed into a war zone, Cate escapes through a window, while Ian, though armed and prepared for the worst, is easily overwhelmed. Later, having been reduced to a sightless head sticking out of a hole in the floor, Ian, who was afraid of ‘‘non-being,’’ begs for death. Cate, who, as Ian thought, was too stupid to even look after herself, resolutely chooses for life: she adapts to the new order, eating the meat she previously scorned and drinking the gin she gained through prostitution. In Cate, the essence of humanity survives, expressing itself in simple acts of decency: an attempt to

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Western Drama through the Ages save a child, to give it a proper burial when it dies, and to look after Ian when he becomes helpless.

The Wages of Sin Arthur Miller once said that the theater he liked and practiced portrays the ‘‘wages of sin.’’ It derives its creative impetus from a moral and ethical vision of shared human values and explores what happens when we ignore or fail to live up to those. Blasted shares this utopian belief in humankind, though violence and obscenity tend to overshadow its hopefulness. Whereas Ian’s first words are ‘‘I’ve shat,’’ his last are a simple and decent ‘‘thank you.’’ At least, he has taken to heart the soldier’s ironic advice that he ‘‘learn some manners.’’ When intense physical suffering strips him of his habitual cynicism, Ian stands revealed as a father worrying about the welfare of his son. Blasted never allows us to forget the pitiful humanity of anyone, even the perpetrators of violence. We see Ian fumbling with his clothes when Cate laughs at the sight of his genitals. We learn that this sexual predator is a puritan at heart, uncomfortable with any frank discussion of sexual matters, as when Cate tells him of her experiences with masturbation, uneasy also at the thought that anyone would suspect him of being gay. Cate believes Ian is ‘‘soft,’’ that he is not as tough as he seems to be. The latter could also be said of Blasted, which despite its gruesomeness verges on the sentimental. Coming out of one of her ‘‘fits,’’ during which Ian masturbates on her helpless body, Cate is said to be ‘‘crying her heart out.’’ While raping Ian, the soldier too is ‘‘crying his heart out.’’ Reporting about the war devastation outside, Cate says, ‘‘everyone in town is crying.’’ And in the end, Ian, embracing ‘‘for comfort’’ the dead body of the man who tortured and raped him, is ‘‘crying, huge bloody tears.’’ Violence in the play is invariably accompanied by a sense of loss, of unspeakable regret. The mention of the ‘‘heart’’ is revealing because it suggests an intangible human interiority, a utopian longing that when overcome by an all too intransigent reality expresses itself in a flood of tears. Water imagery runs through the play, bringing with it a host of metaphysical and religious associations. Every scene ends with the sound of rain, that of spring for scene one, summer for two, autumn for three, and winter for four. Though this effect can hardly be reproduced in production, it indicates that Kane conceived of the events in her play as evolving cyclically, like the seasons. This brings with it expectations of renewal and rebirth, confirmed also in other ways. The quest for absolution and redemption is present in Ian’s repeated attempts to wash the ‘‘stink’’ of his body in the bathroom. The latter is the place from where Cate escapes to the outside, when the soldier invades the hotel room, and from where, after Ian’s mutilation and the soldier’s suicide, she reemerges ‘‘soaking wet and carrying a baby.’’ Time is transcended altogether in the final scene, where it simply

‘‘In Yer Face’’ Theater ‘‘rains,’’ without reference to any season. It pours through the roof onto Ian’s tortured head, and, in an unwished for miracle, brings him back to life after he dies ‘‘with relief.’’ The final impression is one of a world where everything solid has liquefied: as rain is pouring down, blood is ‘‘seeping from between [Cate’s] legs’’ and streaming from Ian’s eyes; Ian ejaculates and defecates on the floor. We have entered an elemental world. In this watery milieu, things are disintegrating, but perhaps also being incubated: the play ends with Ian’s head sticking out of a hole in the floor, eye sockets empty and bloody, being hand-fed by Cate. Stark religious imagery pervades the final scene: the baby, symbol of innocence, has died. Cate gives it an improvised Christian burial, making for it a primitive cross and praying over its body. Ian asks for forgiveness and to be remembered in her prayers. In a caricature of the Holy Communion, Ian devours the baby, and in an equally caricatured representation of the Last Supper, Cate shares sausage and gin with Ian. But if this is meant as a profession of belief, it is indeed a curious one. Ian, who claimed there is no God and that ‘‘when you die, it’s the end,’’ dies and comes back to life again, but only to have his suffering prolonged. Cate, who believes in God and for that reason refuses to help Ian commit suicide, loses the baby she was trying to save. And while the baby who represents the future dies, the man who carries the burden of the past remains alive so that he can die endlessly. Kane was a lapsed Evangelical Christian, product of a strict religious upbringing that had left her with an enduring fascination for the dark stories of rape and murder that abound in the Bible. Perhaps for that reason, she tends to pursue moral and ethical issues not within a well-defined realistic context but set against a larger, eschatological canvas. Blasted’s vision of violence is apocalyptic, not in its cruelty (which is sadly realistic), but in its nameless and timeless universality. Despite Kane’s reference to Bosnia in her account of the genesis of the play, Blasted avoids locating the war in time and space. Ironically, this vagueness has increased the topicality of the play for the post September 11 world. Ian who complains that England is turning into ‘‘Wogland,’’ boasts of having worked for the Secret Service, first disposing of bodies and later doing ‘‘the real job,’’ which apparently means killing terrorists: ‘‘Planting bombs and killing little kiddies, that’s wrong. That’s what they do. Kids like your brother.’’ Blasted, however, is not concerned with analyzing the political and economic underpinnings of terrorism. The latter stands mainly for the vagueness of the threat and the resulting longing for an impossible clarity, expressed in the kind of jingoistic shorthand that fits on bumper stickers: ‘‘Done the jobs they asked. Because I love this land.’’ Lost on Ian, of course, is the irony of posing as the defender of the weak, after having raped Cate and having expressed his disdain for her mentally disabled brother. And what Ian gains is not clarity but guilt and fear of retaliation ‘‘for things I’ve done.’’ The danger now is everywhere, coming not only from unnamed terrorists but also from the Secret Service: ‘‘Think they’re trying to kill me. Served my purpose.’’

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The Collapse of Language War enters the play not as specific historical event but as symbol for the precariousness of civilization, the illusion of which depends on maintaining the difference between here and there, inside and outside, private and public. In the course of the play, ‘‘there’’ enters ‘‘here,’’ demanding to become also its reality. The violence of war brings to the surface the vileness that is supposed to remain hidden underneath, much as in the blinding scene in King Lear, the ‘‘vile jelly’’ is made to erupt from something as smooth and perfect as an eyeball. The war scenes described in Blasted focus on similar images: ‘‘Insides of people’s heads came out of their eyes. Saw a child most of his face blown off, young girl I fucked hand up inside her trying to claw my liquid out . . .’’ When the outside world of public violence blasts its way into the luxurious hotel, it proclaims affinity with the secret criminality of the character hiding there and the private acts of sexual abuse that are taking place within those walls. Ian’s crimes differ from those of the soldier in degree rather than in kind: like the soldier, he raped, but only once; like the soldier, he killed, but refrained from torturing. As Kane said in an interview, ‘‘I do think that the seeds of full-scale war can always be found in peacetime civilization.’’ ‘‘Here’’ is also where violence is mainly an exciting fantasy; ‘‘there’’ is where it actually happens. Without spelling out any arguments, Blasted points to a correlation between an obsession with violence and an inability to conceive of its reality. As a tabloid journalist, Ian gathers sensational stories involving the rape, torture, or ritual murder of teenage girls or young women (‘‘a beautiful redhead with dreams of becoming a model’’). As he repeatedly says, these are just ‘‘stories,’’ without any news value, invitations to fantasize about the very acts they condemn. It does not, for instance, occur to him that, as a 45-year old who sexually dominates and humiliates a naive young woman of 21, he’s not that different from the so-called maniacs, lunatics, and perverts whose exploits he documents. Text is carefully distinguished from reality—at least, in the kind of journalism that Ian practices. The soldier who inexplicably invades the hotel room, with stories about his participation in a kind of violence that outstrips anything Ian ever reported, reminds Ian that the job of a journalist consists in bridging the gap between story and reality. Ian, he says, should make his story real, ‘‘proving it happened’’: ‘‘At home I’m clean. Like it never happened. Tell them you saw me.’’ Although steeped in gory reality, the soldier feels unreal, trapped in an experience so extreme that it cannot be adequately conveyed through words. Ian cannot and will not accommodate his wishes. Later, blind and abused, having become ‘‘a nightmare,’’ Ian too will long for the touch of a human being to convince himself of his own reality and will beg Cate to report his existence to the outside world, to his son Matthew:

‘‘In Yer Face’’ Theater ‘‘Punish me or rescue me makes no difference I love you Cate tell him for me do it for me touch me Cate.’’ And Ian will meet with the same refusal. The stories the soldier tells Ian differ from the latter’s tabloid reports only by the degree of their cruelty: a young boy being shot through the legs, a family murdered, a woman stabbed repeatedly in the groin, a twelve-year old girl sodomized, her brothers strung up by their testicles, etc.—stories of cruelty so extreme as to appear unreal, nightmarish. Kane did not have to invent them: similar reports from the ethnic wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda appeared in the press from the early to the mid-1990s, when Kane was writing Blasted. In writing about the horrors of war, Kane was faced with a problem well-known to writers about the Holocaust. Faced with the singularity of an extreme experience, silence is the only adequate response—or, it should be, if it did not entail the possibility of historical erasure and thus the risk of future repetition. Telling, however, means betraying, compromising the singularity of experience with the communality of language, a language that does not contain a separate code for Truth and that therefore cannot differentiate adequately between accounts of actual torture and the lurid fantasies of the human imagination. The soldier finally reverts to the only way of making words real: he acts them out on Ian, kissing him tenderly, as he used to kiss his love; sodomizing and blinding him, as was done to her by the enemy. Through the repetition of such violence, the soldier is writing himself, leaving onto Ian’s body the indelible marks of his reality, empathizing both with Col, his ‘‘poor love,’’ and with the ‘‘poor fucking bastard.’’ who did to her what he himself did to other women. The play too gives up on words, entrusting its message almost entirely to a series of disconnected tableaux, snapshots of horror lighting up briefly in the darkness. As Kane says, ‘‘it got to the point where I didn’t know what words to use any more, and it was a complete breakdown of language. I thought I’m going to have to do this purely through image, which I’m happier doing anyway.’’

KANE IN CONTEXT: TOWARD A SPECTACULAR THEATER Now almost forty years ago, social critics from Herbert Marcuse to R.D. Laing declared that modern civilized human beings are ‘‘demented creatures.’’ ‘‘Normality,’’ in their view, is the name we give to the routines that allow us to slide along the surface of experience without getting snagged on unpleasant facts. After all, to live, one must forget. And the more we know, the more we need to suppress in order to carry on with our daily business. Today, we are incessantly bombarded with unpleasant knowledge, from newspapers to the Internet, and our powers of denial have increased proportionally to our increased access to unpleasant realities. Modern playwrights are thus faced with an audience whose ‘‘dementia’’ has reached truly frightening proportions.

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Western Drama through the Ages Though the idea that art ought to attack the public’s weakened sensibilities reaches far back, at least as far as the Dadaists, it became increasingly trendy in the late 1960s. In France, the philosopher of theatrical happenings Jean-Jacques Lebel called for art to become a form of violation, a transgression he did not hesitate to liken to rape: the well-known French phrase ‘‘e´patez le bourgeois’’ (impress or shock the bourgeois) became the more pointed ‘‘fuck the bourgeois.’’ Following the Dadaists, Lebel also rebelled against the expectation that art should be seemly and sanitary, with the notorious exclamation ART = SHIT. Defecation on stage became almost de rigueur, as it was more effectively shocking than nudity. So, by the way, was rape—of men rather than of women, because the latter had been too often eroticized. Lebel shared the view of many innovative artists that nothing is more devastating to art than the notion of art itself. The happenings staged by Lebel, or by the more extreme Hermann Nitsch who littered the stage with bloody carcasses, refused to be the exquisite products awaiting refined consumption that lovers of conventional Art had come to expect.

The Theater of Cruelty Performance artists like Lebel and Nitsch, who favor image over word, find inspiration in the ‘‘Theatre of Cruelty’’ of Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), a theatrical innovator who claimed that conventional, text-based theater deepens an audience’s habitual stupor, preventing them from experiencing reality. ‘‘I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad,’’ Artaud declares in ‘‘The Umbilicus of Limbo’’ (1925), ‘‘which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.’’ Engaged on an impossible quest for ‘‘pure’’ sounds and gestures that would pierce people’s souls, he rejected any theater that relies on argumentation, the reasonable and eloquent articulation of thought: ‘‘To save the theater I would even banish Ibsen, because of all those discussions of points of philosophy or morality which do not sufficiently affect the souls of his protagonists in relation to us.’’ Speech, he said, should be used only ‘‘in a concrete and spatial sense,’’ as if it were ‘‘a solid object.’’ The Theatre and Its Double (Le The´ aˆ tre et son Double, 1938), Artaud’s best-known work, is a plea for an anti-realistic, archetypal theater in which words and thoughts would seek their most perfect material incarnation—a theater, in other words, dominated by director and actor rather than by playwright. Artaud’s vision of a purely physical theater reached Britain in mitigated form, mainly via Peter Brook, who presented it first, in 1964, through a spectacular production of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade and then, in 1968, through a treatise on theater, The Empty Space, which supplemented Artaud with insights derived from Bertolt Brecht, Jerzy Grotowski, and Julian Beck. While British theater

‘‘In Yer Face’’ Theater was to remain firmly text-based, playwrights became more eager to explore its spectacular aspects. The work of one group of playwrights stood out in particular: it was called ‘‘neo-Jacobean’’ because of its frequent recourse to violent imagery. After the abolishment of theatrical censorship in 1968, words lost some of their capacity to shock, as virtually anything could be said on the stage; images, however, remained effective and direct, and could still lead to charges of obscenity. The notoriety of the so-called B-Boys, Edward Bond, Howard Brenton, and Harold Barker, was caused mainly by their use of spectacular images. Bond’s career started among the controversy generated by a scene in his second play Saved (1965), in which a gang of young people stone to death a baby in its pram—an image that, more effectively than any dialogue, conveys the boredom of these disaffected youths; Narrow Road to the Deep North (1968) is dominated by the image of the cut up and wrongly reassembled, naked body of the emperor, a striking embodiment of the transformations of power the play is concerned with; and the relationship between money and death in Bingo (1973), a play about Shakespeare’s final years, is represented by the putrefying gibbeted body of a beggar woman. In Brenton’s Romans in Britain, the horror of imperialism is expressed in a drawn-out scene of anal rape, which led to a prosecution on obscenity charges; in Barker’s The Castle (1985), a rebellious woman is condemned to carry the corpse of her male victim strapped to her waist in mock pregnancy. While thematically relevant, such visual shorthand is also meant to shock. Brenton called it ‘‘pissing in the audience’s eyeballs,’’ Bond, the ‘‘aggro-effect.’’

The Theater of Panic and Catastrophism Barker, inspired by Fernando Arrabal’s vision of a theater of panic, advocated ‘‘catastrophism,’’ a term he used for the liberating disorientation he expects an audience to experience after witnessing an overwhelmingly rich theatrical event. In ‘‘Arguments for a Theatre,’’ Barker pitched catastrophic theater against ‘‘humanist,’’ mainstream theater. In a contrived and often questionable schematic comparison, he claims that, whereas the humanist theater aims at educating the audience, catastrophic theater tries to make the audience ‘‘divided’’ so that it ‘‘goes home disturbed or amazed.’’ Catastrophic theater refrains from articulating a clear message: ‘‘the audience cannot grasp everything; nor did the author.’’ This applies to neo-Jacobean plays in general: they are confusing and often upsetting, and generate rather than communicate ideas. Characters in these plays are often grotesque, plots outlandish or absurd, and language poetic in an obscene, baroque, or demented way. The latter flaunts its materiality, in the way Artaud advocated, drawing attention to itself as an artificial construct by refusing to sound ‘‘natural.’’ No longer a natural extension of character, words are put on display, enter the arena of performance—or, as Bond puts it, ‘‘the language is the

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The New Brutalists in Drama This is also the right question to ask of Sarah Kane’s work and that of the ‘‘New Brutalists’’ with which it is often associated. The latter practice what Aleks Sierz calls ‘‘In-Yer-Face Theatre’’ and are influenced both by performance art and by the work of the neo-Jacobeans. ‘‘How can you tell if a play is in-yer-face?’’ Sierz asks in his book In-Yer-Face Theatre. ‘‘It really isn’t difficult: the language is usually filthy, characters talk about unmentionable subjects, take their clothes off, have sex, humiliate each another, experience unpleasant emotions, become suddenly violent.’’ He calls it ‘‘a theatre of sensation,’’ written by a new generation of playwrights (most of them men) brought up on Quentin Tarantino, MTV, graphic novels, cartoons, and pornography. The neo-Jacobeans were children of the welfare state, of the high-minded postwar years of socialist nation building; while they believed, with Bond, that ‘‘the imagination is political,’’ they did not always trust their highly imaginative plays to the free play of an audience’s interpretation and often accompanied them with manifesto-like introductions that hammer the political message home. The New Brutalists, in contrast, are Thatcher’s children, products of a more individualistic and politically disillusioned age. They have the reputation of not pussyfooting around, of saying and especially showing things the way they are. Obscenity is one way of doing that, when it is let out of its pornography paddock and allowed to graze among the serious things. In Neilson’s The Censor a female pornography director tries to save her film from an X-rating by acting out the censor’s secret sexual fantasy. So she squats down in front of him and defecates on the floor. There is little lovemaking in these plays, as is evident already from the title of Mark Ravenhill’s Shopping and Fucking (1996), which features a teenage boy begging to be sodomized with a screwdriver. ‘‘Fucking’’ is escaping the burden of being human, an attempt at becoming elemental and joining the material universe—as simple and devastating as a chemical reaction.

CONCLUSION: ‘‘PURELY THROUGH IMAGE’’ It is impossible to forget these brief flashes of light during which we see Ian in lonely, unobserved desolation act out the rituals of elementary being—masturbating to the obsessive repetition of the word ‘‘cunt,’’ relieving himself on the floor and clumsily trying to clean it up; clutching his hands at his throat in a ludicrous attempt to choke the remaining life out of him. These are private acts one is not supposed to witness—indeed, the kind of acts that drawing room plays, the dramatization of private life, decorously avoid. Watching these silent scenes,

‘‘In Yer Face’’ Theater one realizes how much the bleakness of the bleakest Shakespeare play is relieved by the consoling beauty of words: ‘‘Thou art the thing itself / unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare / forked animal as thou art’’ (King Lear 3.4). How eminently quotable misery can be! The deeper the play descends into despair, the more eloquent and poetic it waxes. The felicitous articulation of insights, of which King Lear abounds, never ceases to remind us that language can still encompass the extremes of being and accommodate even the ‘‘unaccommodated.’’ Blasted refuses such consolation. ‘‘Every act is a symbol / the weight of which crushes me,’’ a disembodied voice intones in Kane’s posthumously produced 4.48 Psychosis (2000). The weight of reality drove Kane finally to the ultimate silence—or, as she puts it in the same play: ‘‘I have become so depressed by the fact of my mortality that I have decided to commit suicide.’’ To watch Ian is to know, if only for a moment, the incredible heaviness of being.

FURTHER READING Artaud, Antonin. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. Translated by Helen Weaver. Edited by Susan Sontag. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Bond, Edward. ‘‘Commentary on the War Plays.’’ Plays: 6. London: Methuen, 1998. pp. 247–363. Edgar, David. ‘‘Provocative Acts: British Playwriting in the Post-War Era and Beyond.’’ State of the Play: Playwrights on Playwriting. London: Faber, 1999. pp. 1–36. Kane, Sarah. Blasted. Complete Plays. London: Methuen, 2001. ———. 4.48 Psychosis. Complete Plays. London: Methuen, 2001. Lebel, Jean-Jacques. ‘‘On the Necessity of Violation.’’ The Drama Review 13.1 (1968): 89–105. Miller, Arthur. Interview. Conversations with Arthur Miller. Edited by Matthew C. Roudane´. Jackson, Mississippi and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1987. Saunders, Graham. ‘Love me or kill’: Sarah Kane and the Theatre of Extremes. Manchester University Press, 2002. ———. ‘‘ ‘Out vile jelly’: Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Shakespeare’s King Lear.’’ NTQ 20, no. 1 (2004): 69–78. Sierz, Aleks. In-Yer-Face Theatre: British Drama Today. London: Faber, 2001. Sontag, Susan. ‘‘Artaud.’’ In Artaud, 1976. pp. xvii–lix.

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Kitchen Sink Drama Reade Dornan

Newspaper critics in the 1960s hailed the appearance of what they called in Britain ‘‘Kitchen Sink drama.’’ Although not a movement or a homogeneous group of like-minded playwrights, this seemingly new direction in theater had its day between 1956 and 1976. Unlike the avant garde theater of Jerzy Grotowski or the theater of the absurd of Samuel Beckett, it had a social message and an ideological stance, which was largely leftist. It drew attention to the conditions of working-class lives: hardships, strong sense of community, and the injustice of limiting their upward mobility. It stood four square against ‘‘the establishment.’’ Many of the plays opposed government regulation, corporate conformity, and commercial manipulation. Unlike traditional theater, kitchen sink drama depicted, sometimes with raw realism, the everyday lives of ordinary people in a struggle against the degradation of powerlessness, the loss of community, or the deadening influence of suburbia. Often it dealt with young people in domestic settings who protested with direct, straightforward, outspoken dissatisfaction against the status quo. Few people outside the press used this term, however. Playwrights such as John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Shelagh Delaney, and John Arden, who were supposedly part of this movement, never referred to themselves as ‘‘Kitchen Sink Dramatists.’’ Arnold Wesker, whose trilogy was closely associated with the term, said, ‘‘Kitchen Sink Drama is a lazy description of a group that didn’t exist. I certainly was not a conscious party to a ‘countermovement to the drawing-room theatre’. We were all so diverse’’ (e-mail message to author March 2005). The widely varied list of authors and works, many of them not even playwrights that are supposedly part of this movement, are John Braine (Room at the Top), Shelagh Delaney (Taste of

Kitchen Sink Drama Honey), Alan Sillitoe (Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner), and Keith Waterhouse (Billy Liar). Also mentioned are Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, John Wain, and Colin Wilson. The commercial media, however, welcomed the tension in the theater created by the suggestion of kitchen sink drama. Holding the trend up as the promising, new direction in theater, critics took aim at prewar matinee favorites such as Noel Coward and Alan Ayckbourn. Although experimental theater forms had already broken with the British drawing room tradition, critics considered kitchen sink drama more promising because of its greater interest to the regular theater-going crowd. It had a cachet that appealed to post World War II egalitarian audiences bent on further dismantling the rigid class system. With its naturalistic form and gritty realism, its accessibility seemed to support the belief that theater had become a popular form for the arts.

FURTHER READING Denison, Patricia. John Osborne: A Casebook. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997. Dornan, Reade. Arnold Wesker: A Casebook. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998.

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Language in Play: From ‘‘Well-Made’’ and Absurdist Plays to Talk Drama Luc Gilleman

ABSURDIST DRAMA Absurdist drama deals with man’s hopeless search for meaning in a meaningless universe. This doesn’t have to be as depressing as it sounds; in fact, senselessness and ennui can give rise to great humor. Think of the dialogue between Flaps and Buzzie, the vultures in Disney’s animated version of Jungle Book (1967), where they keep asking each ‘‘What’ cha wanna do?,’’ never coming to a resolution. Flaps and Buzzie are the Vladimir and Estragon of Disney who, like these clowns from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1952), compensate for their inaction with a prodigious expense of verbal energy, talking about pulling on trousers, and ‘‘going,’’ but who in the end do not move. This music-hall routine concludes a play in which nothing very much happens and nothing is resolved. It is more than just funny, however; it signals a major shift in what we have come to expect of drama since the latter part of the twentieth century. Vladimir and Estragon have been waiting for a certain Godot who has failed to show up. In the end, as at the beginning of the play, they still have nowhere to go and nothing to do. At least since Aristotle’s Poetics (fourth century B.C.), we have been accustomed to think of drama as a form of action, a series of plausibly connected events. In the ‘‘well-made play,’’ incidents are lined up in such a way as to evoke gradually rising and quickly falling tension separated by a climactic moment that often takes the

Language in Play form of a confrontation between major characters. This is when discoveries are made, unpleasant truths are articulated, and characters gain new insights. The audience is expected to leave the theater, in the words of one famous French practitioner of the pie`ce bien faite, ‘‘bien content’’—that is, satisfied in the knowledge that something of importance has happened and that they got its ‘‘point.’’ Euge`ne Scribe (1791–1861), the playwright here alluded to, made himself a fortune, using this handy plot formula to piece together more than four hundred plays—and today, one only has to switch on television to realize that the formula is alive and well and is still making some people a great deal of money. This is not to imply that there is something inherently shallow about ‘‘wellmade plays.’’ In fact, ‘‘serious’’ dramatists, like George Bernard Shaw, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and others, continued to construct plays according to this well-tested plot outline if only because it virtually guarantees the audience’s emotional involvement in the political or psychological argument of the play. As an added benefit, there is something essentially life-affirming about even the most dismal plays that continue to associate a dramatic reversal in the protagonist’s fortunes (what Aristotle referred to as the peripeteia) with a moment of intellectual growth (‘‘recognition’’ or anagnorisis). Linking these two confirms what one hopes to be true of life as well—namely, to put a common saying on its head, that there is no pain without at least some gain. In other words, the worldview endorsed by the well-made play suggests that human suffering is not altogether meaningless. Given the lasting success of this formula, it is then something of a challenge to write a play that offers no clear climax, no true reversal, no discernible confrontation scene, and no definable insight—where, to quote Estragon of Waiting for Godot, ‘‘nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!’’ To be fair, this is not quite an accurate assessment of Waiting for Godot; things do happen in this play: Pozzo and Lucky come by twice, and the second time Pozzo has inexplicably become blind. In Act II, the barren tree of Act I has acquired a few new leaves. Vladimir and Estragon have been presented with certain choices: the choice to help Lucky, for instance, or the choice to move on. Acts of kindness have occurred, as well as acts of brutality. Yet the meaning of these apparently random events and choices is nowhere clearly articulated in the play, and the overall impression is one of almost unbearable stasis, exacerbated rather than relieved by Vladimir and Estragon’s endless patter and intermittently punctuated by the hopeless refrain of ‘‘We’re waiting for Godot,’’ when one of them suggests, ‘‘Let’s go.’’ Despite, or rather because of, this ‘‘pointlessness,’’ Waiting for Godot was quickly recognized as a most moving expression of the existential ‘‘crisis’’ coeval with the advent of modernity and most acutely felt after World War II, when it

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Western Drama through the Ages appeared that neither religion and philosophy, nor advances in technical and scientific knowledge had been able to prevent the horrors of the Holocaust, the death of countless civilians through firebombing, and the nuclear devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here was indeed a human tragedy that, despite being enacted in modern times by supposedly ‘‘enlightened’’ Europeans, defied reason and was singularly devoid of peripeteia and anagnorisis. And it offered neither resolution nor the comfort of a new beginning. The Cold War that followed continued the mindless squandering of human resources in the search for ever-superior methods of mass annihilation. Absurdist drama portrays the desperate existential condition resulting from this failure of the great ideological narratives of human liberation and salvation. As Waiting for Godot demonstrates, in the modern world we have become tellers of little stories, to fill the needs of the moment and while away the time that separates us from death. Absurdist plays, then, are not as pointless as they seem; they are symbolical enactments of particular philosophical insights into modernity. Some playwrights of the 1970s and 1980s, however, seemed interested less in the philosophy than in the technique of absurdism. Because nothing much happens in Waiting for Godot, language becomes its main event. The same can be said of a number of other plays that, while borrowing absurdism’s foregrounding of language, attempted something altogether less ‘‘philosophical.’’ In 1987, an American theater scholar, Timothy Wiles, coined the term ‘‘talk drama’’ to refer to a number of plays of the seventies and eighties that stood out by their unconventional use of language. Wiles emphasized how speech in plays by Sam Shepard, David Mamet, David Rabe, Lanford Wilson, and others no longer played a primarily instrumental function; in other words, it no longer served mainly as a medium to express preexisting truths. The latter, for instance, happens in any conventionally constructed realistic play where characters at some crucial moment communicate their ‘‘inner feelings,’’ articulate what they believe to be their true identity, or reveal a shameful secret from their past. Such a scene usually starts off with a character signaling to the audience that it is on the point of entering a moment of unadorned truth and that language is now going to play its purely transitive function. The confrontation scene in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949) starts with Biff angrily telling his father, ‘‘No, you’re going to hear the truth—what you are and what I am!’’ And the most celebrated moment in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (1879), signaling the emancipation of the long-suffering wife, Nora, begins with the latter telling her husband to ‘‘[s]it down. This will take time. I have a lot to say to you.’’ This belief that one can, in Nora’s phrase, get ‘‘at the bottom of anything’’ through ‘‘serious conversation’’ is essential for any play that aims at presenting an intellectual argument. In contrast, talk drama conjures up a less comforting world that shares no such belief and where characters can no longer be assumed to mean what they say.

Language in Play

TALK DRAMA ‘‘Talk drama’’ is by no means a neat category, governed by principles to which certain playwrights pledge allegiance. The term, however, is useful because it suggests a tendency of many plays since, roughly speaking, the 1970s, to avoid privileging certain kinds of speech as more ‘‘truthful’’ than others. In talk drama, everything is inevitably pulled down into ‘‘talk’’—that is, no character can extricate him or herself from the fray of human interaction in order to deliver an insightful comment and thus, in matter of fact, voice the playwright’s ‘‘point.’’ The latter happens, for instance, in Death of a Salesman, which, despite its innovations in the portrayal of time and space, remains bound by the speech conventions of conventionally realistic drama. At one point, Linda, in a much-quoted speech, neatly summarizes the generative idea of that play: ‘‘Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person.’’ This is not just Linda telling her sons to take their father’s plight seriously; this is Miller telling his audience why he wrote a play about such an insignificant character as Willy Loman. We can think of this as the dramatic equivalent of the omniscient narrator in fiction. In classical tragedy, voicing such comments was the task of the Chorus. It is a tribute to Miller’s artistry that he is able to create the emotional climate in which the audience can accept this stylistically heightened articulation of a ‘‘truth’’ as coming from a mere participant in the action and in the course of a common conversation. Critics who had been trained to search plays for such privileged moments of insight were sorely disappointed when they attended The Birthday Party (1958), the first professionally produced full-length play of Harold Pinter, an English actor who had been writing for the stage since 1956. ‘‘There is no Chorus in this play,’’ Pinter had warned his director: ‘‘The curtain goes up and comes down. Something has happened. Right? Cokeyed, brutish, absurd, with no comment.’’ Critics were now unable to find the play’s ‘‘point’’ neatly summarized by a character. Could the play then be a symbolic enactment of a philosophical idea about the search for sense in a senseless universe? Though Pinter had learned his craft from studying Beckett, whom he greatly admired and later befriended, he did not think of his plays as absurdist either, declaring in ‘‘Writing for Myself’’ that ‘‘what goes on in my plays is realistic, but what I’m doing is not realism.’’ As he explained: ‘‘A character on the stage who can present no convincing argument or information as to his past experience, his present behaviour or his aspirations, nor give a comprehensive analysis of his motives is as legitimate and as worthy of attention as one who, alarmingly, can do all these things. The more acute the experience the less

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Western Drama through the Ages articulate its expression.’’ After all, in real life ‘‘we don’t carry labels on our chests, and even though they are continually fixed to us by others, they convince nobody. The desire for verification on the part of all of us, with regards to our own experience and the experience of others, is understandable but cannot always be satisfied.’’ Ironically, what frustrated theater critics most was Pinter’s insistence on remaining within the constraints imposed by the dramatic genre in which everything is embedded in dialogue so that no gems of insight can be safely extracted from the complexities of interaction. It comes as no surprise to learn that the first production of The Birthday Party had to close down after barely a week. It took some time before actors, spectators, and critics were sufficiently accustomed to the new conventions for the play to be recognized as the masterwork it truly is. What may have eased the assimilation of these new conventions was Pinter’s willingness to situate them within a vision about how language functions in ‘‘real’’ life. According to this vision, communication is a hazardous process during which we constantly renegotiate who we think we are with whom we think our interlocutor believes us to be. In theory, this mirror-effect is endless: ‘‘what is the other thinking of what I am thinking of him thinking of me thinking of him . . .?’’ The inaccessibility of the other’s experience—including of that other’s experience of one’s own experience, and so on—is at the heart of the paranoid universe Pinter’s characters inhabit. Applied to the stage, the most important corollary of such a vision is the loss of a long tradition of articulateness in drama. Much of the joy of watching a conventionally realistic play consists in listening to characters who are far more eloquent than we ever manage to be and who therefore are able to voice with precision and beauty what we might only dimly feel. Pinter’s characters do not allow us that kind of enjoyment. As Pinter puts it, ‘‘you and I, the characters which grow on a page, most of the time we’re inexpressive, giving little away, unreliable, elusive, evasive, obstructive, unwilling.’’ Pinter’s characters do not like to commit themselves unambiguously to their words because they fear having to pay the penalty of clarity—which is to be weighed and found wanting. But ‘‘comedy of menace,’’ the label sometimes applied to Pinter’s drama, suggests that a world without certainty can be both threatening and funny. In The Caretaker, a homeless bum, Davies, is trying to ingratiate himself to Mick in order to seize control of a room he’s now sharing with the latter’s mentally troubled brother, Aston. Davies, however, is unsure of Mick’s real feelings about his brother, but in an attempt to discuss the brother, starting off with, ‘‘Well. . .he’s a funny bloke, your brother,’’ the conversation devolves to Davies agreeing with Mick’s statement of ‘‘I don’t call it funny.’’ Such moments, when a character sticks out his feelers only to pull them quickly back at the least sign of trouble, abound in Pinter. Pinter’s plays are therefore more often about what is left unsaid than what is actually articulated. In other words: whereas conventional drama celebrates eloquence, those moments when

Language in Play characters come fully into being through the perfect articulation of their innermost thoughts and feelings, talk drama explores the dramatic possibilities of inexpressiveness. And whereas conventional drama strives for perfect coherence, suggesting a world in which characters respond to one another fluently, at its best in a polyphony of voices reminiscent of Chekhov, talk drama tends to punctuate each exchange with emphatic pauses that alert us to the gap of misunderstanding that looms between characters who are isolated from one another, each in his or her solipsistic universe. In the United States, Pinter’s experiments with dramatic speech found their most creative application in the plays of David Mamet. Like Pinter and Beckett, Mamet does not care very much about stringing together a series of events in the manner of the well-made play. Mel Gussow refers to Mamet’s work as ‘‘plays of indirect action,’’ in which most action is concentrated in the language, in what words do rather than say. In an introduction to American Buffalo, Mamet explains the primacy of language as follows: ‘‘The way we use [language], its rhythm, actually determines the way we behave, more than the other way around. . . . Words create behavior . . .; our rhythms prescribe our actions.’’ And again, as with Pinter, critics have acknowledged the possibly ‘‘realistic’’ nature of such language. As Jack Kroll put it in a February 1977 Newsweek review: ‘‘Mamet has heard the ultimate Muzak, the dissonant din of people yammering at one another and not connecting. He is a comic eavesdropper who’s caught the American aphasia.’’ The characters’ lack of articulateness in talk drama makes us aware of how speech comes into being haltingly, as ideas are constructed and renegotiated on the go—in a conversational battlefield, so to speak. In Glengarry Glen Ross (1983), Mamet makes disjointed ‘‘stutter speech’’ emblematic of capitalism itself, of a world in which nothing can escape the workings of the market. Like Willy Loman, Levene is an aging salesman, down on his luck and intent on getting Williamson, his younger interlocutor in this conversation, to give him preferential access to the best ‘‘leads,’’ thus increasing his chances of brokering a successful sale and perhaps saving his job. Put in a similar situation, Loman discovered in his despair the courage to confront his boss unambiguously: ‘‘I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can’t pay my insurance! You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!’’ Levene never reaches a comparable moment of eloquent self-realization. His broken language, a challenge for the actor who has to catch the complex rhythm of such speech, betrays the effort he has to expend in order to maintain control over the interaction. And thus, before he is able to formulate his request, he has already thoroughly disqualified himself. In Glengarry Glen Ross, the salesmen’s mantra ‘‘Always Be Closing,’’ the ABC of competitive salesmanship, perfectly sums up the new status of language. Nothing

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Western Drama through the Ages transcends the world of buying and selling. Words too have entered the market place; they are being bought and sold, their value determined by market forces. Even a moment of intimacy between characters, an exchange of confidences, sooner or later stands revealed as a form of entrapment and mastery. Much of the humor in this kind of play is based on the characters’ insecurity in a world in which the meaning of words is relative and the intent of a conversation can never be properly gauged. This instability of meaning and intent is a boon to the salesman who knows how to let an idea slip imperceptibly into action. In the following dialogue, Moss is deftly manipulating his colleague Aaronow into becoming his accomplice in a robbery of the leads, where he convinces Aaronow that ‘‘we’re just speaking about it. (Pause.) As an idea.’’ As any shrewd salesman, Moss introduces the robbery as a mere idea, something to talk about ‘‘in the abstract,’’ until ‘‘just talking’’ imperceptibly turns into ‘‘actual talking,’’ and Aaronow, the weaker salesman, finds himself an ‘‘accomplice’’ in a criminal action he never endorsed. With Glengarry Glen Ross, we have moved far from Death of a Salesman. The latter was still built around a longing for inalienable essences, and speech still managed to fill the gap between what one is and what one appears to others. In talk drama, this is, generally speaking, no longer the case. This does not mean that characters in such plays no longer suffer from the hemorrhaging of selfhood that Death of a Salesman so movingly portrayed. They do, and that is why we remain interested in them. But we learn it not so much from what they say as from what they are unable to say because they have no way of expressing it ‘‘truthfully’’—in a way that would transcend the give and take of interaction. For the spectators, this poses a challenge. Faced with a play in which one can never be sure whether what characters are saying is real or fabrication, spectators must at every instance wonder what momentary impulse the language is responding to. In a play where language, not event, becomes the mainspring of stage action, spectators have to examine who tries to control meaning and how language affects issues of territory, power, and strategy. And when speech is used mainly strategically, in the here and now, as a form of continuous self-fashioning rather than self-expression, we should keep in mind that what is being said always depends on how, why, and to whom it is being said. But it is a challenge well worth taking up: as theater emancipated itself from storytelling and evolved from the event-based well-made play to language-based absurdism and talk drama, it learned to make better use not only of the dynamic potential of drama but also of the audience’s ability to deal with the resulting increase in interpretive uncertainty. As Pinter put it in a letter to Peter Wood, ‘‘There is no end to meaning. Meaning which is resolved, parceled, labeled and ready for export is dead, impertinent—and meaningless.’’ In the final instance, it is up to us, the audience, to keep drama alive.

Language in Play

FURTHER READING Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Leon Golden. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1968. Arvin, Neil Cole. Euge`ne Scribe and the French Theatre, 1815–1860. New York: B. Blom, 1967. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. Translated by Samuel Beckett. New York: Grove, 1982. Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. 3rd ed. London and New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll House. Ibsen’s Selected Plays. Edited by Brian Johnston. Critical Edition. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 2004. 143–206. Koon, He´le`ne and Richard Switzer. Euge`ne Scribe. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Mamet, David. Glengarry Glen Ross. New York: Grove, 1983. Miller, Arthur. Death of a Salesman: Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem. New York: Penguin, 1998. Pinter, Harold. ‘‘A Letter to Peter Wood’’ (1958). Drama 142:1981. ———. The Caretaker. The Caretaker & The Dumb Waiter: Two Plays by Harold Pinter. New York: Grove, 1988. pp. 7–78. ———. ‘‘Writing for Myself’’ (1961). Complete Works 2. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. ———. ‘‘Writing for the Theatre’’ (1962). Complete Works 1. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990. Taylor, John Russell. The Rise and Fall of the Well-Made Play. London: Methuen, 1967. Wiles, Timothy. ‘‘Talk Drama: Recent Writers in the American Theater.’’ Amerikastudien 32.1 (1987): 65–79.

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‘‘Oh, die Angst! die Angst!’’: Romeo and Juliet as Rock Opera William Hutchings

Even if, as Robert Hapgood maintains, Hamlet ‘‘has been performed more than any other [play],’’ Romeo and Juliet surely comes in as a close second—and surely surpasses it if the various musicals, ballets, adaptations, and redactions are also included in the total. Its title characters are undoubtedly literature’s most iconic: their names and their clandestine balcony liaison have long pervaded popular culture, emblematic of heedlessly passionate young love. More than four centuries of its performance history constitute a surprising and often peculiar chronicle, however, that has only recently come into full recognition as a subject of systematic academic inquiry and assessment quite distinct from scholarly exegesis and textual scrutiny.1

THE RICH PERFORMANCE HISTORY OF ONE PLAY Like Shakespeare’s comedies, Romeo and Juliet has proven extraordinarily transposable across cultures, settings, and periods. In 1998, a New York production titled simply Shakespeare’s R&J (adapted and directed by Joe Calarco; John Housman Studio Theatre) presented the play’s ‘‘star-crossed lovers’’ as both male, played by students in an all-male Catholic school; at about the same time, the stylized film version directed by Baz Luhrmann was set in a decidedly futuristic, very postmodern Verona Beach where dueling-pistols replace rapiers and a television newscaster delivers the play’s prologue. The first major production of the twenty-first century, however, is the French musical version by Ge´ rard Presgurvic—a rendition that was first produced in Paris at the Palais de Congre`s

Romeo and Juliet as Rock Opera in 2001 and has since been seen by over six million theatergoers throughout the world, with productions mounted in Antwerp (September 2002, Standschouwburg Theatre), London (November 2002; Picadilly Theatre), Budapest (January 2004, Budapest Operetta Theatre), Moscow (May 2004, Moscow Operetta Theatre), and Vienna (February 2005, Raimund Theater).2 Productions in Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, China, Japan, and Korea are currently being planned. Following vituperative reviews of the English-language production in London, however, there are apparently no current plans to bring it to the United States. An examination of it in terms of its relationship to Shakespeare’s text, which has preoccupied some reviewers, is a relatively futile exercise; the story has obviously not only been set to music but has also been translated into French, then subsequently retranslated into German and/or back into English and/or into other languages as well, so much of the original poetry has necessarily been lost—and is hardly of significant interest to the decidedly youthful audience for whom the production seems intended anyway. Instead, when considered within the long and often bizarre production history of Romeo and Juliet, in both musical and nonmusical forms, this latest incarnation as a rock musical seems to fit within traditional stagings in quite unexpected ways and to introduce innovations that have gone unappreciated in its reviews.

MUSICAL VERSIONS OF ROMEO AND JULIET That Romeo and Juliet would be transformed into a rock opera is hardly surprising; indeed, the surprise is that it had not happened long before now, given more than five decades of rock history and the play’s long history of musical adaptations. Among the earliest were two French musical versions that premiered near the beginning of the Reign of Terror; written by J.-M. B. de Monveil (1792) and J.-A. de Se´gur (1793) respectively, they featured happy endings in which the young lovers survive. Vincenzo Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi, the first operatic version of the story, was produced in 1830, but it was a dramatization of Shakespeare’s Italian source materials rather than the English play; Romeo is here a captain of the Ghibelline faction in its struggle against the Guelphs. Hector Berlioz’s ‘‘dramatic symphony’’ Rome´o et Juliette (1839) was based on Shakespeare’s play (more specifically, a version modified by David Garrick) but rendered the title characters without dialogue; though the roles of Mercutio and Friar Lawrence were sung, the lead roles were presented only through ‘‘the orchestra[’s]. . .instrumental language.’’ Charles Gounaud’s opera version of it (1867), still the most often revived, followed Shakespeare’s play more faithfully than any of its predecessors, although Friar Lawrence’s potion takes effect during Juliet’s wedding to Paris; she and Romeo die simultaneously rather than one after the other, and they sing

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Western Drama through the Ages a duet in the tomb. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s version (1869, revised 1888) is purely orchestral; Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet (1940) emphasized spectacle and swordplay but also featured an emphasis on state power. Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story (1957, originally conceived by Jerome Robbins, libretto by Arthur Laurents), of course, audaciously transposed the story into then-contemporary New York City, the feuding Montagues and Capulets being replaced by street gangs named the Sharks and the Jets. Yet as iconic as that landmark production was and is for their parents, grandparents and perhaps great-grandparents, many of today’s generation find its melodies only slightly less quaint—and its gangs only slightly more menacing—than those in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance.

The Rock Opera of Romeo and Juliet Structurally, Romeo and Juliet is particularly suitable for adaptation into a rock opera for reasons that were best articulated by the Victorian actor Henry Irving in 1882, quoted by his colleague Ellen Terry: ‘‘Romeo and Juliet proceeds from picture to picture,’’ he explained, adding that ‘‘[e]very line suggests a picture. It is a dramatic poem rather than a drama’’—in contrast to Hamlet, which ‘‘marches from situation to situation.’’ In adapting the play into his rock opera, composer and librettist Ge´rard Presgurvic realized that it could change scenes with virtually every song, given a suitably versatile set (designed by Duncan Hayler)— and that, indeed, each song could itself advance the plot (which is, after all, so widely known that it can readily be followed even by those who do not know the language in which it is being sung). Accordingly, there are seventeen songs (excluding the overture and the finale but including several reprises) in the each of the two acts, as listed in the play’s program. Those marked with an asterisk are the sixteen tracks of the ‘‘Cast Album—Wien’’ released by HitSquad Records (2005): Act One Overture (Ouveture) Prologue * Verona (Verona) The Duke & ensemble The Conflict (Der Kampf) Instrumental * The Hatred (Der Hass) Lady Capulet, Lady Montague & ensemble * Once (Einmal) Romeo and Juliet The Wedding Plan (Der Heieratsantrag) Paris & Lord Capulet Rejoice About the Wedding (Freu Dich auf die Hochzeit) Lady Capulet & The Nurse Once (Einmal, reprise) Juliet * Men of the World (Herrscher der Welt) Romeo, Mercutio, Benvolio, & ensemble * The Angst (Die Angst) Romeo * The Ball (Der Ball) 1 Instrumental Happiness in Love (Liebesglu¨ck) Romeo & Juliet

Romeo and Juliet as Rock Opera The Ball (Der Ball) 2 Instrumental * I am Guiltless (Ich Bin Schuldlos) Tybalt The Balcony (Der Balcon) Romeo & Juliet We Are Of Flesh and Blood (Wir Sind Aus Fleisch und Blut) Mercutio, Benvolio, The Nurse, & ensemble * See There, She’s In Love (Siehe Da, Sie Liebt) The Nurse * Love (Liebe) Romeo & Juliet Act Two Have You Heard (Habt Ihr Schon Geho¨ rt) Mercutio, Benvolio, Romeo, & ensemble It’s Time (Es Wird Zeit) Tybalt & ensemble * The Duel (Das Duell) Tybalt, Mercutio, Romeo, Benvolio, & ensemble Mercutio’s Death (Mercutios Tod) Mercutio & Romeo Revenge (Die Rache) Lord Capulet, Lady Capulet, The Nurse, The Duke, Lady Montague, Romeo, Benvolio, & ensemble * Despair (Die Verzweiflung) Friar Lawrence, Lord Capulet, The Nurse, Lady Capulet, Benvolio, Lady Montague, & ensemble The Song of the Lark (Der Gesang Der Lerche) Romeo & Juliet Not for Long (Nicht Lang) Lord Capulet, Lady Capulet, Paris, The Nurse, Juliet, & ensemble * My Dear Child (Mein Liebes Kind) Lord Capulet * Without You (Ohne Sie) Romeo & Juliet The Gift (Das Gift) Juliet Verona II (Verona II, reprise) The Duke * How Do I Tell Him? (Wie Sag Ich’s Ihm) Benvolio Romeo’s Death (Romeos Tod) Romeo * Juliet’s Death (Julias Tod) Juliet * Why? (Warum) Friar Lawrence, Lady Capulet, The Nurse, & Lady Montague Guilty (Schuldig) Lady Montague, Lady Capulet, The Nurse, Friar Lawrence, Lord Capulet, Benvolio, The Nurse, Paris, & ensemble Finale

With most songs lasting from three to six minutes, and with each constituting a separate ‘‘picture’’ (in Irving’s terms) that necessitates a change of scene, the production requires a highly adaptable and physically moving set. The pace established by the director and choreographer, known only by the single name Redha, was especially well suited to an audience long accustomed to the pacing and aesthetic of music videos and/or Baz Luhrmann’s film version of the play. Designed by Duncan Hayler, the set for the Vienna production proved remarkably versatile and rapidly transformable, while taking full advantage of the cavernous stage space of the Raimund Theater. The cityscape of Verona was represented by four stone towers, each of which was three stories in height. Each of these could be moved or reconfigured as necessary for changes of setting and utilization of stage space: street scenes, the masked ball, the fight on the piazza, etc. Each tower also could be rotated to reveal one or more interior acting areas. Thus, for example, the interior of one of the central towers was used for those scenes taking place in the Capulets’ house; Juliet’s bedroom

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Western Drama through the Ages was the topmost of the three areas. Friar Lawrence’s cell was the interior of the tower located at stage right; it too was rotated into existence only when needed. The entire multi-towered set could be covered by a rotatable ‘‘city wall,’’ used to conceal larger set changes (including the removal of all four towers) as the solos are performed on the stage apron. Thus, Romeo’s ‘‘Die Angst’’ precedes the fullstage masquerade ball, and the nurse’s ‘‘Siehe Da, Sie Liebt’’ takes place immediately before the full-stage full-ensemble finale of Act One. When the audience has become accustomed to the particularly busy and fast-moving set, the stark minimalism of the interior of the Capulets’ tomb comes as a visually stunning change: her body, clad in white, lies atop a unadorned black bier at center-stage in front of a solid, bright, blood-red backdrop that extends from floor to ceiling; the bier is surrounded by low white stage-smoke that completely covers the stage floor, and a bare scraggly tree at stage right (suitable for use in a production of Waiting for Godot) is the sole other adornment of the entire acting space. At the moment of her death, the red backdrop collapses, leaving only stark blackness visible behind the scene.

DEPARTURES FROM THE SCRIPT The scene in Juliet’s tomb contains one of the rock opera’s most flagrant departures from Shakespeare’s version of the story: Juliet awakens from her druginduced not-death just after Romeo has fatally stabbed himself but before he dies. This change, which wrings yet more pathos out of their mutual demise, allows not only a love duet that is almost irresistible to composers (this is, of course, the most iconic Liebestod of all time) but also a moment of anagnorisis, Aristotle’s term for the moment when one or more characters come to a realization of the true state of affairs, having been previously in error or ignorance. If she awakens only to find his newly-dead body, Romeo has died without learning the bitterly ironic truth. Theirs is, therefore, a tragedy merely because of misfortunate timing; there is no evidence whatsoever to support the Chorus’s contention that they are ‘‘starcrossed’’ lovers (Prologue, line 6), that the ‘‘fault’’ or responsibility is in their stars rather than in what Thomas Hardy, in the poem ‘‘He Never Expected Much,’’ termed ‘‘just neutral-tinted haps and such.’’ Had Juliet awoken two minutes earlier, before Romeo acted on his mistaken perception that she is actually dead, the play would have the happy ending of all traditional comedy: the happy couple would presumably have ridden off into the night, escaping the tomb to live happily ever after (insofar, of course, as any married couple ever does). Had Friar Lawrence’s letter been delivered promptly, Romeo could have waited there however long it took and the happy ending would have been the same. This point is made emphatically within the souvenir program sold at the Vienna production itself—in a full page advertisement extolling the reliability of the Austrian Post Office.

Romeo and Juliet as Rock Opera Although this change in Shakespeare’s plot often offends purists and (more important) startles theatergoers exactly as intended, it has a surprisingly long and especially distinguished provenance in the play’s production history. Specifically, the alteration of the final act was first added by the famed actor and playwright David Garrick in 1750—who defended the scene based on a vital but quite surprising literary precedent: [Matteo] Bandello, the Italian novelist from whom Shakespeare has borrow’d the subject of this play, has made Juliet to wake in the tomb before Romeo dies: this circumstance Shakespeare has omitted not perhaps from judgement [sic], but from reading the story in the French or English translation, both [of] which have injudiciously left out this addition to the catastrophe.

The scene is thus a restoration of the plot line of the original story that Shakespeare, whether inadvertently or deliberately, omitted from his stage adaptation. Garrick’s version added seventy lines of dialogue, in which Romeo explicitly blames the feuding fathers’ ‘‘flinty hearts’’ that are unmoved by their children’s tears, and he dies cursing his fate. Bellini’s opera in 1830 also gave the young lovers a duet in the tomb and a simultaneous death (both roles were played by women). Gounaud’s opera in 1867 did the same, although Romeo in this version is portrayed by a male. In the latter half of the twentieth century, the ‘‘early awakening’’ was included in productions at Stratford, Ontario in 1960 (starring Julie Harris, directed by Michael Langham), at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1976 (directed by Trevor Nunn and Barry Kyle), and in the film directed by Baz Luhrmann in 1996 (starring Leonardo diCaprio and Claire Danes). Although the scene still retains its ability to surprise the audience (and distinctly audible gasps came from audience members at the performance I attended in Vienna), its inclusion in Presgurvic’s rock opera has a surprisingly long series of precedents and is less innovative than it may seem.

ACTORS OF THE RIGHT AGE When considered within the long production history of Romeo and Juliet, another aspect of the rock opera is far more radically innovative, even though it is now in fact de rigeur: the casting of age-appropriate actors in the roles of the title characters. The problem, as previous generations saw it, was eloquently stated by Emma Stebbins, the companion and biographer of Charlotte Cushman, a noted Victorian actress who played the role of Romeo: ‘‘When a man has achieved the experience requisite to act Romeo, he has ceased to be young enough to look it.’’ Since no casting details survive from the original production of Romeo and Juliet, no one knows who originated the role of Romeo—but if, as most authorities speculate, it was Richard Burbage, he would have been nearly thirty at the time of the first performance (circa 1594–96). His Juliet, of course, would have been a

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Western Drama through the Ages prepubescent boy dressed as a girl, as were all other players of female roles in Shakespeare’s time. For centuries thereafter, more and less renowned actors of middle age and even older performed the role of Romeo as audiences more or less willingly suspended their disbelief: David Garrick at 44 in 1761; Spranger Barry at 49 in 1768; Edwin Booth at 36 in 1869; Henry Irving at 44 in 1882 (opposite 36year-old Ellen Terry as Juliet); John Gielgud at 31 in 1935, alternating in the role with Laurence Olivier, then 28. Although it is virtually impossible to determine the oldest Romeo and Juliet ever to trod the stage, the list of prime contenders would surely include the American E. H. Sothern, who performed as Romeo until the age of 65 in 1924, opposite his wife Julia Marlowe, who was then 57; the oldest Juliet, however, may have been the Victorian actress Fanny Kemble (1809–93), who first played Juliet when she was 20 but ‘‘continued to give readings of it, public and private, until she was at least seventy.’’ Still other productions gained fame (or notoriety) with unorthodox casting in even more unusual ways: in 1744, for example, Theophilus Cibber played Romeo at age 41 opposite his own 14-year-old daughter Jane (Jenny), provoking a reaction of outrage and scorn long before the now-obvious Freudian qualms about such a pairing had ever been formulated; the American actress Charlotte Cushman (1816–76), who ‘‘was the most acclaimed Romeo of the [nineteenth] century—male or female,’’ sometimes played the role opposite her own sister as Juliet. Perhaps the twentieth century’s most inapposite casting, however, was 46-year-old Leslie Howard, who was cast as Romeo in the 1936 film adaptation directed by George Cukor; his appearance elicits guffaws from today’s college students when it is shown in class. Given this long if little-known tradition of less-than-youthful casting, the use of age-appropriate actors is a relatively recent innovation—primarily post-1960, when producers and directors, emboldened by the success of West Side Story (1957; film, 1961) with its youthful gangs, presented the play as having as much or more to say about violence and hatred as about clandestine love. The earliest production to cast literal teenagers in both leads, however, came in 1905, when William Poel cast Esme´ Percy as Romeo and Dorothy Minto as Juliet—a production about which George Bernard Shaw remarked that When [Poel] found that a child of fourteen was wanted, his critics claimed, ‘Ah—but she was an Italian child, and an Italian child of fourteen looks exactly the same as an Englishwoman of forty-five.’ Mr. Poel said ‘I do not believe it . . .I will get a child of fourteen,’ and accordingly he produced Romeo and Juliet in that way and for the first time it became endurable.

The major transition to the use of teenaged actors, however, came with Franco Zeffirelli’s film version of the play in 1968, casting 18-year-old Leonard Whiting and 17-year-old Olivia Hussey in the lead roles—a subject that drew extensive

Romeo and Juliet as Rock Opera critical attention at the time (much of it unfavorable), as did its brief and now-mild nude scene; composer Nino Rota’s ‘‘Love Theme’’ for the film, ‘‘A Time for Us,’’ was strongly reminiscent in tone and sentiment to the Bernstein-Sondheim song ‘‘Somewhere’’ from West Side Story. Despite many critics’ tepid-to-hostile reactions, the film became tremendously popular and virtually iconic, far more influential than any stage productions thereafter; no other film of Romeo and Juliet was made until Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 version starring 24-year-old Leonardo diCaprio and 17-year-old Claire Danes. Decidedly postmodern despite its retention of Shakespeare’s language, it set the play in a dystopian future with corporate skyscrapers labeled Montague and Capulet, handguns instead of swords, hallucinogens, SWAT teams in helicopters, punk fashions, a television newscaster delivering the prologue, numerous witty pop culture allusions, and a locale known as Verona Beach. Its jump-cut editing gave it an aesthetic long familiar to viewers of music videos, and its constant visual inventiveness made the long-familiar play seem quite new. Like Zeffirelli’s film before it, it seems likely to remain iconic for its generation—and would necessarily have to have been taken into account in designing Presgurvic’s rock opera, since many if not most of its young audience members (as well as numerous older ones) would have to be presumed to have seen it. The post-Luhrmann effects in the Vienna staging of Presgurvic’s rock opera are most evident in its costume design and lighting as well as in its casting. In the costume design by Dominique Borg, the Capulets were costumed entirely in red and the Montagues in blue (as in Zeffirelli’s film), with the hues often intensified by lighting of the same colors but in stark contrast to the spotlighting of Romeo and Juliet. The masked ball, however, was costumed entirely in white for as long as the revelers’ identities had been concealed; when their Montague or Capulet allegiances came out, a return to colored lighting restored their hues. Serving as the narrator during the opening scene and (of course) remaining neutral between the two colorfully-clad factions, the Duke (cast as being in his twenties at most) wore a silvery greatcoat over what appeared to be black pajamas. Whereas Luhrmann’s version was set in a specific future, Borg’s designs combined elements from various periods, as if to emphasize that it could be taking place in any era. The women’s costumes tended to be more characteristic of the Renaissance than those of the men; the fathers’ costumes tended to be more Victorian in style. The street combatants wore jeans—some with Renaissance-style codpieces, some with customary modern fronts—and form-fitting and/or semi-transparent shirts; their major (second) fight was staged shirtless, lit by bright spotlights directly overhead as they ‘‘froze’’ in positions that accentuated the musculature of their forms. Romeo was played by 24-year-old Lukas Perman, who, having been one of twelve finalists on the Austrian television program ‘‘Starmania,’’ was readily recognizable to many in the audience and brought to the role all the friskiness that a rocking Romeo

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What Is a Rock Opera? As used here, the term ‘‘rock opera’’ denotes a subgenre of the modern stage musical. Although there are several little-known Italian forebears, the first major self-proclaimed ‘‘rock opera’’ to have been staged was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar (album 1970; stage version 1971). The Who’s Tommy, though released earlier (album 1969) and also self-described as a ‘‘rock opera,’’ was filmed in 1975 but not adapted for the stage until 1993. Apart from the obvious distinction that it features rock music (which differentiates it from the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Les Mise´ rables, Phantom of the Opera, and countless others before and since), a ‘‘rock opera’’ lacks prose dialogue; consisting entirely of a sung libretto that accompanies a full orchestra, it is thus differentiated from ‘‘rock musicals’’ (such as Grease, for example). Its source may be a canonical literary or musical text (e.g., Jonathan Larson’s Rent, based on Puccini’s La Bohe`me), but not necessarily so. The term ‘‘opera’’ also connotes stage spectacle and grandeur, though its images may be as iconoclastic in those of Tom O’Horgan’s original New York production of Jesus Christ Superstar or as untraditional as the pinball wizardry of Tommy; due to its subject matter, however, Rent is an exception. For further details, including the Italian origins of ‘‘rock opera’’ and the term’s coinage by Pete Townshend of The Who, see the entry for ‘‘rock opera’’ at en.wikipedia.org. The German version of Presgorvic’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet is simply and straightforwardly subtitled ‘‘Das Musical,’’ however, deliberately avoiding the more apposite term—perhaps as a marketing strategy designed to appeal to a demographic for whom the term ‘‘opera,’’ rock or not, might be disincentive to attend.

should have as well as a diCaprio-like profile and winsomeness, particularly in his ballad of adolescent lovelorn agony titled ‘‘Die Angst’’— surely paradigmatic of its kind. As Juliet, Marjan Shaki (also an exceptionally younglooking 24 years old) provided a fine and convincing complement to Perman. Presumably in the interest of time, a number of Shakespeare’s plot details were consolidated or altered. Mercutio and Tybalt died in the same street fight, so there was no murder outside the Capulets’ tomb. Strangely, Friar Lawrence’s messenger was a whitegarbed, cowled, Death-like figure; he and (separately) Romeo were waylaid by ragged, almost Beckettian figures that may or may not have been intended to resemble the Furies. A final distraught aria sung by Friar Lawrence (‘‘Warum[?]’’ / ‘‘Why?’’) strongly implies that his faith has been severely shaken by the outcome of the plan that he devised; however, the finale (‘‘Schuldig’’ / ‘‘Guilty’’), performed by the entire company, suggests that all have been in one way or another complicit in the

circumstances that contribute to the young lovers’ deaths. Presgurvic’s adaptation of Romeo and Juliet may well remain primarily a European or at least non-Anglophone phenomenon, however. The London premiere of its English

Romeo and Juliet as Rock Opera adaptation, co-written by director David Freeman and lyricist Don Black, was assailed by critics as ‘‘a dire pop-rock fiasco’’ with a set made of ‘‘industrial scaffolding,’’ costumes that featured ‘‘the tat of sub-Versace,’’ and a ball scene that was ‘‘gobsmackingly tacky, with sprayed shop-dummies for gold statues.’’ Reviewers also vied to quote the most egregious lines from Black’s ‘‘deplorable’’ lyrics, which featured ‘‘false rhymes, no rhymes, and trite rhymes.’’ Among the prime contenders were: • ‘‘. . .Lord Capulet. . .lilted: ‘My Juliet, so sweet, so small / A smile that could make giants fall’.’’ • the Nurse sings that ‘‘Now she’s in love and everything has changed / Her feelings and her hair have all been rearranged,’’ even though her hairstyle was not changed at any point in the production. • ‘‘ ‘You turn my stomick [sic]; I want to be sick,’ croons Tybalt.’’ • ‘‘. . .After the wedding night, as the banished Romeo must leave, he leaps off the balcony with a cheery ‘‘It was the night of my life. Thanks.’’ • ‘‘Meanwhile Tybalt informs Lady Capulet: ‘‘Your daughter is being stuffed by a Montague.’’ • ‘‘. . .The feuding gangs. . .deliver such lines as ‘Romeo’s dipping his wick in the old man’s daughter,’ or ‘Lady Montague’s in a right state’.’’ • ‘‘ ‘Find a place. Get a priest. And send me a message,’ this practical-minded Juliet barks at [Romeo] as he climbs down [from the balcony].’’ • ‘‘‘Here goes,’ chirrups Juliet as she downs her poisonous potion.’’ • ‘‘‘Forbidden love comes at a price / But it is worth the sacrifice,’ the young lovers chorus unconvincingly.’’

Seldom if ever had there been a musical detailed with more woe than Black and Freeman’s Anglicized version of Presgurvic’s Romeo.3 Yet for the remarkably young audience in Vienna, and apparently for many others like it, for many of whom this may well have been their first ‘‘adult’’ musical other than Starlight Express or the various Disney productions, it was an entirely different matter. To paraphrase Yeats’s famous line from ‘‘Among School Children,’’ this was no theater for old men, nor old women. Neither was it their English teachers’ revered and lofty poetry, nor their grandparents’ beloved musical of a half-century ago. After the play’s appropriately solemn finale, with the families duly united in grief and guilt, there came perhaps the most surprising innovation in the staging of the entire show: following a long silent blackout in which the cast reassembled for its curtain-call, there was a lengthy reprise of one of the most rousing songs, as the actors led the audience in a rhythmic clap-along, the two leads encouraging the audience to join in a basic dance step (two claps high, one clap low). Joyously, the audience was soon entirely

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NOTES 1. See, for example, the excellent Shakespeare in Production series (Loehlin 2002). All details concerning the production history of Romeo and Juliet in this essay refer to this edition. 2. All details about performance in this essay are based on the production of Romeo & Julia: Das Musical at the Raimund Theater in Vienna, June 2006. The German translation of the libretto (from the original French) is by Michaela Ronzoni with Julia Sengstschmid. Translations of song titles into English are my own. The production closed on July 8, 2006, after a run of one and a half years. 3. The other prime contender for the worst musical adaptation based on a famous literary work is surely A Doll’s Life (1982), a purported sequel to Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Directed by Hal Prince and written by the legendary musical team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, it closed after a single performance—and established its reputation as one of the worst flops in Broadway history. For details, see Frank Rich’s ‘‘ ‘A Doll’s Life’: Sequel to Ibsen,’’ The New York Times, September 24, 1982, C-3.

FURTHER READING Bassett, Kate. ‘‘From Bard to a Great Deal Worse.’’ Independent on Sunday (London). November 10, 2002. Features sec., 7. ———. ‘‘Arts Etc.: 2002 Review of the Year: Theatre.’’ Independent on Sunday (London). December 22, 2002. Features sec., 4. Cavendish, Dominic. ‘‘Never Was a Musical of More Woe.’’ The Daily Telegraph (London). November 5, 2002. 20. Clapp, Susannah. ‘‘. . .They’ve Lost the Plot in Romeo and Juliet: The Musical.’’ The Observer (London). November 10, 2002. Observer Review Pages, 14. Gardner, Lyn. ‘‘Shakespeare Meets Europop: Romeo and Juliet: The Musical.’’ The Guardian (London). 16. Garrick, David. ‘‘To the Reader,’’ 1748 ed., Romeo and Juliet, in Garrick’s Adaptations of Shakespeare, 1744–1756, edited by Henry William Pedicord and Fredrick Louis Bergmann, vol. 3 of The Plays of David Garrick. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1981. p. 77. Hemming, Sarah. ‘‘A Terrible Tragedy of Errors: Romeo and Juliet: The Musical.’’ The Financial Times (London). November 6, 2002. 16. Loehlin, James N. ‘‘Introduction.’’ Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare in Production series. Edited by J.S. Bratton and Julie Hankey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Romeo and Juliet as Rock Opera Russell, William. ‘‘Theatre: Romeo and Juliet—The Musical.’’ The Herald (Glasgow). November 15, 2002. 22. Taylor, Paul. ‘‘A Virtually Merit-Free Zone: Romeo and Juliet: The Musical.’’ The Independent November 8, 2002. 23.

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The Primal Power in Harold Pinter and Edward Albee: The American Dream Destructed Penelope Prentice

Edward Albee and Harold Pinter, the two greatest living dramatists in their respective countries, the United States and England, born two years apart at almost opposite ends of the economic and social spectrum, exhibit striking parallels in their lives and plays. To appreciate the notable similarities and the significance of their differences is to appreciate the greatness of their work that continues to delight and disturb, to provoke and inspire change. The primal power in Albee’s and Pinter’s work, the terrifying, yet wittily delightful, life-and-death conflicts, originates at the conjunction of comedy and conflict. These polar opposites create a breadth and depth captured in Western theater’s ancient icons of drama, the laughing and crying masks, emblems of fear and desire. Comedy and conflict representing contradictory yet essential human emotions—terror and joy—drive almost all human thought and action. Where conflict, the essence of drama and growing tip of life, provokes change, comedy, traditionally defined as truth and pain, discloses how change is possible. Albee and Pinter wed conflict and comedy exposing the American Dream, which America had exported to the world, as a greed-driven hunger in a quest for something greater, love—just love: a love that is just. Unlike a Neil Simon, Albee and Pinter never use humor to distance the self from pain, but to make the terror bearable as they convey unsayable truths. Laughter, as the flash point of insight, illuminates our darkest side allowing us to see in that generosity of light a trust that offers the optimism that change is possible. Comedy and conflict in Albee’s

The Primal Power in Harold Pinter and Edward Albee and Pinter’s work conspire to create that generosity and optimism necessary for productive change. The human faces of Harold Pinter and Edward Albee allow us to appreciate the common wellspring of values driving the primal qualities—the struggle for respect, love, and ultimately life, a just life. The two dramatists began life on very different squares yet have delivered plays with a primal power that move us as few dramatists have in the twentieth century. At the Albee Playwrights Conference in Alaska commemorating forty years of offBroadway, it was easy to see that among all the invited luminaries in attendance, none touched Albee for his delightful and disturbing qualities, and at the 2005 Albee Conference only Tony Kushner appeared as a contender.

THE LIVES AND CAREERS OF ALBEE AND PINTER In 1928 Albee was born and adopted into a newly wealthy family that owned vaudeville houses across America and lived in the exclusive, Protestant section of Larchmont in suburban New York City, wintering in Palm Beach, summering in the Adirondacks and New Hampshire, and later dividing time in the City in a Park Avenue apartment untouched by the Depression or World War II. In 1930, two years after Albee’s birth, Pinter was born to Jewish parents far from the center of London in bustling Hackney where his father, a ladies tailor, lost his job; then during the war Harold was evacuated alone to the countryside, returning home to see flying bombs chugging down his street and his own backyard in flames. Both men were largely self educated following high school. While Albee got himself expelled from a number of boarding schools—Lawrenceville and Valley Forge Military Academy, where he claims the two courses taught were ‘‘sadism and masochism’’—he managed to graduate from Choate where he says he discovered how to teach himself, and spent several years at Trinity before dropping out of college. Harold Pinter distinguished himself as a scholar-writer, athlete, and Shakespearean actor at Hackney Downs Grammar school, but because he did not have Latin could not go to Oxford or Cambridge. Both men left home to ‘‘join the circus,’’ so to speak. Edward Albee, who had begun working at age ten, chauffeured to a local drugstore to work as a delivery boy, left home at twenty-one after a spat with his mother, moved to a cold water flat in the Village among composers and writers in New York City where he received $25 a week from a $100,000 trust fund, and worked delivering telegrams. Harold Pinter, who as a conscientious objector after World War II narrowly escaped prison, dropped out of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (being intimidated by golden haired girls in ankle bracelets), and after attending the Central School of Acting went to school in Shakespeare, joined and performed in two traveling Shakespearean theater companies.

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Western Drama through the Ages Both men began writing very young. Albee wrote his first play, the Play About Sex he claims his mother destroyed, at thirteen. Over thirty years ago Albee’s unpublished manuscripts arrived at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, revealing eight short plays written in his twenties over a ten year apprenticeship, but displaying almost none of the incisive wit and brilliant turns that would mark Zoo Story he wrote at the age of thirty, the one-act prelude to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf that changed American theater and audiences forever. Harold Pinter’s manuscripts and papers have only this past decade arrived at the British Museum. As a young actor he wrote hundreds of poems in his dressing rooms after graduating from Hackney Downs Grammar School where he had written impassioned essays on war, film, theater, and the main topics that would capture his adult focus. Harold Pinter wrote his first play The Room at twenty-seven at the instigation of his boyhood friend Henry Woolf, who produced in Bristol Drama School and performed in it then and again later in the revival in a London double bill with Pinter’s most recent full-length play Celebration (2000). The Room was followed by The Birthday Party, a play both more delightful and darkly disturbing than anything before in Western drama, a play that would change the face and soul of drama in the world forever. Both Albee and Pinter drank at the height of their early fame. Pinter listed drinking along with sex, reading, writing, and cricket as among his favorite occupations. Albee was known for his feistiness when he got drunk. He no longer drinks at all, and Pinter limits himself to champagne and white wine. Drinks and drinkers would careen through their early works revealing truth tellers and fools. Both had a first sexual experience at thirteen. Albee slept with boys. If he went to bed with girls, he said, ‘‘I never felt the same pleasure from it.’’ Sex, liberated in their work as generosity and a liberality, also dramatizes how loveless lust can destroy. If magnanimity is the crowning virtue, both men exhibit extraordinary generosity to other, younger writers, supporting other writers and playwrights as few other dramatists this past century. Albee’s The Barn, a summer-long artists colony at Montauk, furnishes four writers and two painters with a one-month residency. Albee selects the poets and painters. He teaches in Houston, taught at Johns Hopkins, lectures and gives master classes at the Albee Conference in Alaska. Pinter directs and promotes plays of others and, at Greville Press, publishes poets from around the world. Always fiercely private, he rarely attends conferences, even the London Pinter Festival 2000 except to give a reading and to come to dinner. Both have had longtime, beloved companions. Albee, after living with composer Ned Rhorem, and playwright Terence McNally, now for many years has lived with Jonathan Thomas, a Canadian painter. Pinter, after a long marriage to Vivian Merchant, the actress who starred in many of his early plays and died in an alcoholic suicide, is now married to writer and historian Lady Antonia Fraser,

The Primal Power in Harold Pinter and Edward Albee a brilliant and beautiful woman with six children and over a dozen grandchildren. Yet, in a sense both men are childless in ways that have also entered their plays— Albee has no children and Pinter is estranged from his son Daniel who suffered a breakdown after Pinter left Vivian Merchant. Daniel Pinter now lives as an almost total recluse composing music, supported by Pinter, with whom he has no communication. Neither, perhaps, will have his own children or grandchildren at his deathbed, a scene played out with absent or silent children at the end of Pinter’s Moonlight and Albee’s Three Tall Women. Each man has allowed himself to be the subject of a recent authorized biography, Mel Gussow’s Edward Albee: A Singular Journey and Michael Billington’s The Life and Work of Harold Pinter. Both biographies contain public confessions of sexual honesty: Albee speaks openly of his homosexuality and Pinter confesses an affair during his first marriage with journalist Joan Bakewell which informed Betrayal. The brutal honesty they demand in their work and permit in these largely laudatory biographies furthers appreciation of the common wellspring of their primal powers—the deadly conflicts in service of love, justice, and life. Both Albee and Pinter value a fierce honesty in their work and both are extraordinarily funny, often as delightfully playful in life as in their writing. In their plays, they both provoke laughter as the flash point of insight to expose hypocrisy and, for Albee, the lies the American Dream exported to the world. When the visiting woman in Albee’s American Dream complains of the heat, her host suggests, Why don’t you just take off your dress. She does. This simple comic technique, which both use, pushes the cliche´d word to an act, unexpected and extreme. In their hands comedy remains fresh, brilliant—revealing the wisdom of comic wit. Yet at some point in both Albee’s and Pinter’s plays, conflict becomes deadly serious—life literally or metaphorically is at stake. But after Pinter and Albee it seems difficult to take seriously anything that isn’t witty.

ALBEE’S AND PINTER’S WORK Comedy and conflict conspire as the catalyst in their work, like the Zen slap of enlightenment, to produce change. George, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in his quest for truth leaves no illusions intact, including his own, and demands of characters and audience alike what Richard does at the end of Pinter’s The Lover, ‘‘Change.’’ How? Western drama born of a civilization devoted to reason, twice a year, spring and fall, sought ecstasis, a going out of the self in Bachnalian ecstasy, binge orgies, to bring back greater truths to daily life in order to return to the polis, to participate in public life. That origin of drama is retained in only a few moments of greatness in Western drama: the Greeks, Shakespeare, and in the last century in Pinter and Albee. A country must come almost of age before it can produce drama—in America the first dramatist Eugene O’Neill appeared only in the

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Western Drama through the Ages twentieth century almost a hundred years after the great fiction writers and poets, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson. The late Alan Schneider, a long time director of Albee’s work, claimed all twentieth century drama is about the impossibility of living with illusions and the impossibility of living without illusions. Albee’s and Pinter’s work seems to ask, ‘‘When do dreams become illusions? When do nightmares become delusions?’’ As in ancient drama, answers lie in the extent to which one knows one’s self and faces that self honestly and wholly. But equally, for both Albee and Pinter those questions and conflict also connect to love, or the absence of love, and in their most recent plays they dramatize how the loveless destruct. There is a significant difference in how Albee and Pinter dramatize conflict, the heartbeat of drama and growing tip of life—Pinter deploys a vison, Albee engages with memento mori stories. Yet both execute conflict and action through dialogue with a rapier wit that plays against the grain, delivering an anti-American Dream take on life. Applying words of American political cartoon satirist Sorel, their work dramatizes ‘‘keeping the world safe for hypocrisy.’’ In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, George asks Martha to show Honey the toilet, ‘‘where we keep the euphemism.’’ Where Albee delivers his drama delightfully and disturbingly through story, narratives that forward the conflict and action, Pinter does so through a vision of paradoxical, primal conflict: the awful paradox at the center of each Pinter drama, each beat, scene, act, and each play as a whole is that the very desire for survival, respect, and ultimately love, when driven by a need to dominate another to prove self-worth, destroys the relationship, the other, and less obviously the self, the community—even, obliquely, the country a character seeks to preserve. Albee’s life-and-death stories, like George’s famous bergen story in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, about the boy who orders bergen (bourbon) in a bar, sending the entire bar up in gales of laughter, are both funny and terrifying, as in this case where we later learn the boy killed his parents in an automobile accident and ends in an asylum never to speak again. The story may or may not be true, may or may not be George, but reveals the illusive and transformational qualities of laughter on the self and reality. Another witty story that also signals a transformational point of no return occurs in Albee’s Three Tall Women about a wealthy old woman approaching her final decay, her middle aged keeper and her young attorney, a thinly disguised story of Albee’s own recently late, adoptive, shop girl mother who married into wealth. The old woman recalls her younger self seated at her dressing table after a party. She is approached by her husband naked except for a diamond bracelet dangling from his erection, a gift he offers her in exchange for a certain sexual favor, oral sex. She refuses. The disappointed erection drops the bracelet that her husband gives her anyway. In his gesture and her act something is severed—nothing between them will ever be the same again.

The Primal Power in Harold Pinter and Edward Albee Still slightly shocking, amusing to a middle class, middle aged heterosexual audience, his overture might be dismissed as merely a sexual act divorced from love. But Albee’s witty, (possibly true) unforgettable gesture becomes a weather vane that points to love contained within the circumference of the diamond bracelet and what it represents—a faithless husband buying (forced to buy?) the favors of sales girls (his wife before their marriage), and the lure and promise of wealth which attracted this woman to that man in a loveless marriage. Albee’s real life adoptive mother Frankie says she married Albee’s adoptive father because he made her laugh, though Albee retains no memory of his doing that, and only slender memory of the man. In the second act the three women blend into three stages of one woman’s life where the young no-nonsense attorney, an optimistic dreamer, cannot imagine nightmare possibilities that await her in middle age and advanced years. Three Tall Women thus becomes a play of understanding and forgiveness of a woman who in his private and public life Edward Albee viewed as his adversary and nemesis. In this play he dramatizes both her remarkable strength as a tall woman and how her loveless life destroyed pleasure for others, and ultimately herself, in her bitterness in the end as her silent son sits at her bedside bearing witness without communication, which Albee claims they never had in real life anyway. This lack of bonding points to a second significant difference in the lives of Albee and Pinter, which, however, produces yet again a similar outcome in their work. Albee grew up in the absence of love—describing himself as someone who was never even touched, or hugged by his adoptive parents, and aside from childhood playmates and one close friend, describes himself as a child as ‘‘pathologically shy,’’ a loner, alone and lonely, yet he claims he never doubted his work would be great. In contrast, Pinter is described by a childhood friend as so loved by his parents that he had a supreme confidence and many close friends. As Jennifer Mortimer, who grew up with Pinter, remarked on his position among his closest friends, the gang of five boys at Hackney Down Grammar School, ‘‘Harold wasn’t fighting for supremacy. He was just floating to the top because of his genuine interest and love and talents. His parents must have been so wonderful to him because he has never, ever really doubted himself.’’ Ultimately, both Albee’s and Pinter’s focus on love, and the destructiveness of lovelessness, that extends beyond the private self, family, and friends to the world, disclose how lovelessness destroys real and just dreams. Both dramatists, politically active, confront injustices of the world in their work and with their lives. While Albee’s work seemingly remains focused on the private lives of characters, Pinter’s recent plays Celebration and ‘‘Press Conference,’’ reveal public people in their public lives devoted to public and private destruction. Yet both writers dramatize not an intellectual hatred, but a visceral and just repugnance to any self-created sham that does not permit love but strangles it,

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Western Drama through the Ages destroying the self and others. But it is the desiring, dreaming about, longing for, and seeking love in Albee’s and Pinter’s characters that allows us to care deeply about them, however misguided or abortive their attempts to be loved and respected. That palpable desire for love in the face of the comic and tragic in life, separates the work of these dramatists from the work of other playwrights and exposes lesser life-and-death threat adventure stories as trifling. Albee and Pinter dramatize desire as a dream far beyond the material promises fundamental to human well-being, growth, and transformation as to concern us all, dancing as we are at the edge of the grave. Their characters who each exist along the continuum of the two poles of drama, the masks of horror and hilarity, show us our own face wholly. The ribald wit of the characters in Celebration thinly disguises their lives lived as the living dead. But Albee’s and Pinter’s plays refuse to allow us any escape through escapist entertainment. Celebration’s very title resonates with the dramatic irony of other paradoxically celebratory titles throughout the Pinter canon, from The Birthday Party and Homecoming to New World Order, all dramatizing characters whose primary qualities illuminate the opposites as their essential truth. The Birthday Party ends in the birthday boy Stanley’s psychological destruction; Homecoming, in the expulsion of the returning son, Teddy, and New World Order, in a relapse into a world viciously primitive. In Celebration, Lambert and Julie, in their forties, celebrate their wedding anniversary with Matt and Prue in a restaurant described as the most expensive in town while at another table Russell, in his thirties, and Suki, in her late twenties, dine together. Later, Lambert points to Suki and announces at his anniversary celebration that he once ‘‘fucked her when she was eighteen,’’ invites her over to their table with Russell who, sniffing the power these men possess, proposes a business deal with Matt and Lambert, who, in the end, picks up everyone’s tab, and all exit except the Waiter. Significantly, the celebrants remain seated, not taking action, but each clearly revealing insecurities. ‘‘They believe in me,’’ are Russell’s first words to Suki. And Lambert at his table crows, ‘‘I know I’m well liked . . .I trust my family and my friends. . .deep down they trust me. . .they respect me. . .’’ Like all self-referential statements in Pinter’s work, they each signal just the opposite: Russell’s lack of self-confidence and Lambert’s self-loathing. ‘‘Do you know how much money I made last year?’’ Lambert asks his wife. His pride and identity rests solely in his money making prowess as all their insecurities register when they are visited by Richard the owner and Sonia, his hostess, whom almost all trash as lessors. The nameless Waiter offers reminders of power and real fame as he interjects recollections of a remarkable grandfather who, he claims, knew catalogues of early and mid-twentieth century luminaries in literature, the arts, and politics—from Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Auden, Dylan Thomas, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Hardy, to Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, Al Capone, John Dillinger, Gary Cooper, Igor Stravinsky, Picasso, and the Three

The Primal Power in Harold Pinter and Edward Albee Stooges to reveal Mussolini, Hitler, and Churchill all in bed together—with his grandfather and the Archduke, obliquely linking politics and the arts among all those in power. Yet, however impressive the list, its ephemeral qualities shadow all earthly immortality. In this play nothing seems to happen—except almost every celebrant’s line edged with a deadly wit is designed to destroy a previous speaker and in a single stroke slash into multiple others with sustained, almost unreleased tension which brilliantly dramatizes how the loveless destruct; in destroying what they cannot have or create—love—they destroy others, community and almost imperceptibly the self. The women unquestioningly endorse their men’s material prowess equated with love, relinquishing their own power. Suki tells Russell ‘‘I want you to be rich, believe me, I want you to be rich so that you can buy me houses and panties and I’ll know that you really love me.’’ These people hardly seem evil incarnate. Nobody dies in the end. And we as audience laugh all the way up to the final slow fade—‘‘not. . .a bang but a whimper.’’ Yet what happens before our eyes is not funny but horrifying, at depth—only if we allow ourselves to look beneath the surface. These men, the power brokers of the world, grocery clerk bureaucrats who run the guns, drugs, and money of the world exchange for millions, scarcely hint at their work. And for good reason. Like Goldberg and McCann who cart Stanley away at the end of The Birthday Party, their ‘‘job’’ is required to be conducted clandestinely even from family, except for those in the club who know the code words and have the cash and savvy to enter and play. Celebration, wedding anniversary as commitment to marriage, reveals human relationships to be a facade, commitment to community, country, even to self, as nonexistent except as practiced at the primal edges of power among the recently moneyed privileged, where power, as the raw assertion of the self when money as power replaces desire for all else, dramatizes the pervasive destruction that results when no ethical basis asserts itself. These characters exceed the destructive limits of fanatics driven by personal vision even in Pinter’s torture plays. These people are driven by no vision. Like Pinter’s characters throughout his canon they fight most viciously to maintain what they have rather than gain what they do not. Reflexively fighting the desire to sustain power, they are without conscience. As such, they are extremely dangerous, perhaps the most dangerous of all Pinter’s characters. The sexually brutal language of Pinter’s recent torturers has assimilated itself into the dinner table talk: men and women calling one another fuckpigs, men calling each other cunts—this from the writer who once insisted we use such words sparingly because we have so few vivid intensifiers. But in Celebration the language foregrounds the longing for love. Lambert, just before he invites Suki to his table, confesses to his wife, brother and sister-in-law that he once ‘‘fell in love.

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Western Drama through the Ages And was loved.’’ When his wife says, ‘‘That must have been me,’’ he says ‘‘You?’’ as if the idea had never occurred to him, ‘‘No, not you.’’ Yet it is precisely this longing for love that points up love lacking among all these characters. Pinter’s own ability to Cinderella himself beyond a dream into palaces of princes, presidents, and their bureaucratic attendants has yielded no happily-everafter endings. Where Chaucer’s saving grace of satire reveals corruption in the guise of courtliness among the holy orders centuries ago, Pinter’s comic tone unmasks far more than sanctimonious hypocrisy and corruption—showing us the faces of outright destructors, brutally laughing at their deadly deals in the name of ‘‘peacekeeping.’’ Pinter most remorselessly attacks the democratic impulse in the American Dream because he values it so highly. Whereas in Pinter’s essays, letters, lectures, and in the ‘‘NATO Action in Serbia Speech’’ he delivered just prior to writing Celebration, he names America as a ruthless, selfinterested, destructive aggressor, in his plays he shows us how comedy in our time can be more deadly serious than tragedy. Celebration’s characters are caught not in the act of overwhelming destruction but of playing. Pinter’s comedy remains in the service of exposing the terror as evil: annihilation committed by quite ordinary people, who, despite their extraordinary wealth and delightfully inventive but malicious ribaldry, are not so different from us. How better than through comedy to confront ignorance and inaction, to face it boldly before it is too late? But we are more likely, the recent plays imply, to cling tenaciously like the character Rose to our familiar room or restaurant, getting news of the outside world second hand, or to remain ignorant, than we are to act. What do these characters—and we—want? The characters in Albee’s and Pinter’s most recent plays seem to have everything the American Dream can offer: often unimaginable wealth, power, family, seeming friends, but in their lovelessness the goods of that Dream creates only a velvet prison, soul destroying. Albee could deconstruct the American Dream from the inside. After Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was passed over for a Pulitzer, in fact the prize wasn’t even awarded in drama that year, many assumed that Albee would turn it down when he received it for A Delicate Balance. He considered doing so, but asked how he could criticize the prize if he did turn it down. His two recent plays Sylvia, or the Goat, and Occupant play out his own selfinvention. Occupant accomplishes this through Albee’s friend and mentor Louise Nevelson, via a young man’s interview with the dead artist, unmasking the awful evanescence of life and fame and glory in art in our time. In Sylvia, a middle-aged middle class suburban husband announces to his wife and gay son he has fallen in love with a goat. In an almost Proustian feat, Albee offers an apology for, in the sense of defense of, homosexuality. Where Proust rails against homosexuality for seven-volumes till we cry ‘‘Uncle’’ and say ‘‘What’s so bad about that?’’,

The Primal Power in Harold Pinter and Edward Albee Albee goes further by offering bestial love, till by contrast homosexuality seems quite acceptable while exposing unexamined assumptions and received values that threaten to destroy us all. When in the end the wife enters bearing in her arms the blue-eyed goat she’s slain, the indelible image carries the weight of biblical and ancient Greek sacrifice. (Albee claims the first time he saw a crucified Christ over a church altar he wept). But while animal lovers, such as Albee is famously, might be moved by the dead goat, Albee seems to be questioning not only this woman’s love for her husband when jealousy outweighs her understanding, but also notions of sexual exclusivity in marriage, and even the proper object of desire in love. Whatever feltthought shivers through an audience at the end, the awful finality in this goat’s death seems on almost all levels to question the very nature of love. For surely her killing is not an act of love. Her husband’s honesty in relating his communion with this animal in their exchanged glances has not destroyed the marriage so much as exposed a marriage not grounded on love. Albee has remained an inside outsider, able to navigate the upper classes and heterosexual marriage, half proud of his privileged background, yet ever aware of those unjustly treated. Yet to others who might envy him, he is always quick to point out how unhappy he was as a child. The silent son who appears at his mother’s deathbed at the end of Three Tall Women reflects Albee’s own decades of silence and inability to really converse or ever connect with his own adoptive mother. In Albee’s late sixties, at the end of her real life in her nineties, he was further estranged from his mother’s fortune, almost entirely depleted and except for a small stipend, never passed on to him. But Albee made his own comfortable God-Bless-the-Child-Who’s-Got-His-Own existence, to pass the gift of time on to others. Both Albee and Pinter actively rally in demonstrations, in their writing, letters and signing petitions, in support of PEN, Amnesty, and causes of justice and peace around the world. No Western playwright better dramatizes the causes of human violence than Pinter. However important it is to expose falsity in the American Dream that continues to persist for Americans primarily of a certain class, Albee and Pinter dramatize what Martin Luther King said, ‘‘When the world looks back on the twentieth century, they will weep not for the atrocities that took place, but for the silence of the good people.’’ Perhaps that is where their drama brings us, to that point that it tosses the important questions of our time to us, and if we are to have the last laugh, any laughs, to pass that laugh of enlightenment on to others, then surely the questions they raise we must answer with our lives. Pinter and Albee in the completeness of their work show us the classic faces of both horror and joy—it is all there, the full spectrum of life, that comprehensive soul that can evoke in us all life’s terror and pity and that Aristotle knew is what

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Western Drama through the Ages moves us. If tragedy is being overcome by one’s strengths and comedy, overcoming one’s weaknesses, they combine both in perfect balance—a balance that dramatizes how the strengths of the American Dream that promises everyone a chance to obtain unlimited goods also threatens to destroy us all unless we confront our insecurities and claim courage which is love. As Albee and Pinter traverse the full distance between both poles of comedy and tragedy, their comedy conveys a generosity and optimism necessary to productive action. Despite Pinter’s recent announcement that he will write no more plays, both he in his many speeches and essays and Albee in his plays continue to move us somewhere new. In their new work love and lust butt up against loathing, rejection against intimacy, the familiar against the unexpectedly bizarre, normalcy against nightmare—establishing a dynamic beyond rejecting either/or dichotomies or embracing irony. We can see irony as the article of faith of the fearful and faithless: those who have no trust in themselves and are afraid to be found out as fools cover their butts with irony to say, ‘‘See! I didn’t mean that at all.’’ But Pinter and Albee through comedy and conflict seem to say, ‘‘I meant both; I/we are both, are all: bastard, saint, thug, and angel.’’ To seek truth in a free society requires each of us to be a hero—to claim courage to act with just love. To define greatness is to attempt to define that ineffable quality, genius—exemplified by those who change the way we feel, think, and, above all, act. Pinter has changed the way comedy and melodrama reveal and make the felt, primal terror bearable, to give us courage to recognize our power to act, to act responsibly and productively to counter the forces of hypocrisy, dishonesty, lies, injustice, and destruction everywhere. Albee and Pinter have exposed the terror within the American Dream in ways only genius can. They have made it felt palpably, yet both have invited us into their presence to discover our own genius—to feel, to think, to act with just love.

FURTHER READING Esslin, Martin. The Theatre of the Absurd. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1973. Gordon, Lois. Harold Pinter: A Casebook. New York: Garland, 1990. Mann, Bruce. Edward Albee: A Casebook. New York: Routledge, 2003.


Realism Robert F. Gross

Not many years ago, I was seated in an off-Broadway theater, waiting for the performance to begin. On the stage was the living room of an apartment, conservative but elegant. When two other audience members sat down to my left, one of them looked at the set and gasped in astonishment. ‘‘Oh my God!’’ she exclaimed. ‘‘That’s my father’s apartment!’’ This woman’s response to the set shows the realist impulse at its simplest and most immediate. It also reveals the most basic pleasure we derive from it: the pleasure at the recognition of a correspondence between something onstage and something in the world outside. It may be in props, setting, costumes, lighting, or language. It may be in behavior or motivation. But it gives the thrill of a simple response—‘‘I know that!’’ Or it may give us pleasure by showing us something that we know exists in the world, but which we have not witnessed. The spectators at the first production of Sidney Kingsley’s Men in White (1933) had, by and large, not ever been present at a surgical operation, and were fascinated to observe it in the theater. Most of us have never worked in a big restaurant, but Arnold Wesker’s The Kitchen (1959) allows us to look behind the scenes and enjoy seeing how a professional kitchen operates. There is a pleasure in simply watching workers erect a large tent onstage during David Storey’s The Contractor (1969) and see how they do it. Realism takes language, objects, and actions from the world outside the theater to persuade us of the validity of what we are viewing. At its simplest, realism is not a style; it is an impulse. It may exist in combination with highly theatrical elements—things we would never see outside the theater. Euripides used chant, poetic meters, masks, and highly elaborate costumes

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REALISM FROM THE RENAISSANCE TO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Realism as an impulse makes its presence felt throughout the history of theater. Realism as a style has its roots in the Renaissance, but does not become a conscious and consistent style until the second half of the nineteenth century. In the Renaissance, the realistic impulse found much greater opportunity in the world of comedy than in tragedy. Renaissance definitions of tragedy and comedy divided the genres along class lines: tragedy was supposed to deal with the fall of monarchs and courtiers; comedy, with the follies and affectations of

Realism commoners. The diction and tone of the former was to be exalted and dignified, and usually in verse, while the latter was given much more opportunity to imitate the language and customs of daily life. Even in England, where neoclassical strictures were far less pervasive than on the Continent, comedy was the more realistic genre. In the vibrant citizen comedies of Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, references to the minutiae of merchant-class life abound—commercial law, popular plays, superstitions, fashions—often leaving the twenty-first century reader at a loss without a carefully annotated edition of the play and a map of London to decipher the references. Although the characters are often comic types and the plots improbably contrived (though delightful) webs of confidence tricks, amorous intrigues, disguises, and coincidences, these highly theatrical plays are grounded in observations of contemporary life. As a result, citizen comedies such as Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599); Ben Jonson, George Chapman, and John Marston’s Eastward Ho! (1604); and Thomas Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (c1605) and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1611) offer us far more insights into the daily lives of their original audiences than the tragedies of their age.

The Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Comedy remained the preferred genre for realistic observation well into the eighteenth century. Although the comic playwrights of the Restoration are mostly celebrated for arch, witty, and highly stylized presentations of amorous intrigue, they conducted interesting forays into realism as well. The protagonist of Thomas Otway’s bitterly satiric Friendship in Fashion (1678) cynically disposes of discarded mistresses by passing them on to his unsuspecting friends, and eventually provokes his own neglected wife into taking a lover. His The Soldier’s Fortune (1680) shows the anger and poverty of cashiered soldiers, for whom sexual conquest only partially compensates them for their marginal status. In The Wife’s Excuse (1691), Thomas Southerne vividly depicts the social whirl of London’s elite—musical soire´es, private raffles, afternoon teas, and masquerades—and its moral bankruptcy. Southerne is unusually adroit in his realistic handling of social gatherings in which his characters mill about, grouping and re-grouping, exchanging the latest gossip, and strategizing the next seduction in bright, terse dialogue. His realism, however, not only manifests itself in his brilliant sketches of social life, but also in psychological portraiture. Mrs. Friendall, caught in a humiliating marriage to a cowardly, philandering lout, becomes the object of malicious speculation in a world that assumes that any woman in an unhappy marriage will inevitably take a lover. As the play opens, the footmen gamble while their employers revel within, and the footmen take the prospect of Mrs. Friendall’s infidelity as inevitable. But Southerne’s realistic impulses lead him to undermine the character

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Western Drama through the Ages type of the unfaithful wife so common in the Restoration stage: even when Mrs. Friendall wins a separation from her husband, she is far from happy, and still shows no inclination to choose a lover. Both Southerne and Otway’s protagonists are more complex and subtly drawn than those of the citizen comedies—a mark of increasing realism. As the middle class continued to rise in the eighteenth century, so did the taste for realism. Denis Diderot (1713–84) advocated a drama of bourgeois life that more closely imitated the rhythms of daily speech and more freely mixed genres in its depiction of daily life. In Germany, tragedies of middle-class life began to appear, articulating the difficult rise of the German middle-class against local rulers who were not much different from feudal lords. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Emilia Galotti (1772), J.M.R. Lenz’s The Soldiers (Die Soldaten, 1776), Friedrich Schiller’s Politics and Passion (Kabale und Liebe, 1784), diverge from the tradition of writing tragedy in verse, insist on the dignity of the bourgeoisie and the importance of its dilemmas. During the early part of the nineteenth century, the stage was dominated by romanticism, and the movement toward realism halted. It began to gain momentum again, however, around mid-century, when realism became a conscious literary and theatrical movement. Reacting against the fanciful world of popular melodramas, it insisted on characters who were individuals rather than types, and settings that were specific to the action, rather than stock. In the French theater, social issues began to be treated more straightforwardly, often leading to fights with the censors and intense controversy. Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824–95) dramatized his novel, The Lady of the Camelias (La Dame aux Came´lias), better known as Camille, in 1850, but it was not approved for production until 1852. The story of the beautiful and doomed courtesan Marguerite Gautier and her sacrifice for the youthful and impetuous Armand Duval both fascinated and outraged audiences across Europe and the Americas with its depiction of the world of the contemporary courtesan—a milieu hitherto taboo in the theater—but also reduced them to tears through its sentimental and idealized portrait of the ‘‘fallen woman.’’ ‘‘It is all champagne and tears’’ observed Henry James, pithily encapsulating the play’s long-lasting appeal. Dumas’s combination of realism and romance proved well-nigh irresistible, and made it one of the most popular and influential plays of the century. Less romantic and more morally didactic than Dumas, Emile Augier (1820–89) helped popularize the social drama, taking on such topical issues as the power of the press and the manipulation of the stock exchange. An exponent of traditional values, Augier assailed what he saw as the greed, materialism, and ostentatiousness of the middle class. In Olympe’s Marriage (Le Mariage d’Olympe, 1855), he acerbically commented on the vogue for sentimentalizing the prostitute, initiated by The Lady of the Camelias.

Realism A courtesan who reinvents herself as a respectable woman in order to hoodwink the wealthy heir of an old family, Olympe inevitably falls back into her disreputable ways. The scene in which she entertains her vulgar mother and louche companions in her husband’s absence was considered shocking even decades after its premiere. But time has attenuated its notoriety, and Olympe’s Marriage, for all its sharp observations of Second Empire manners and mores, strikes readers today as more melodramatic in its plot contrivances and villainous protagonist than realistic. Yet Augier’s dramaturgy has not vanished. Even today, playwrights and filmmakers graft realistic observations of milieu onto intricate and even improbable plots. The ongoing popularity of intricately contrived suspense plots, whether with detectives, secret agents, or confidence men, is evidence of the continued hybridizing of realism and melodrama.

MODERN REALISM Ibsen Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), popularly known as ‘‘the father of modern drama,’’ while using the forms of French social drama, gradually simplified the plotting and deepened the characterizations, doing much to free realistic drama from a dependency on melodramatic devices. Although not completely free of melodramatic elements—forged documents and blackmail—A Doll’s House (Ett Dukehjem, 1879) is generally regarded as a major step forward in the development of realism. The blackmailer is not a villainous type, but a sad and desperate character whose downfall was caused by the same crime, forgery, as the heroine’s. Nora Helmer is a brilliant and highly individualized portrait of a woman who has led a protected existence as a ‘‘doll,’’ first under the control of her father and, later, under her husband. As Nora’s assumptions about herself and her marriage collapse, she realizes that her first obligation is not to her husband and children, but to herself. She returns her wedding ring to her husband, releasing him of any marital obligations, and demands the same from him. At the end of the play, in one of the most famous concluding scenes in all of drama, Nora departs, having decided ‘‘I can no longer be satisfied with what most people say—or what they write in books. I must think things out for myself—get clear about them.’’ As the curtain falls, we hear the door slam as she disappears into the night. Not only was A Doll’s House widely interpreted, and often vilified, as a manifesto for the feminist movement, but Ibsen’s iconoclastic assertion of the rights of each person to self-fulfillment above all other obligations struck a blow for individualism that led the play to be adopted as a polemic for both liberals and anarchists. His next play, Ghosts (Gengangare, 1881), intensified Ibsen’s attack on conservative values. The ‘‘ghosts’’ of the title are, as protagonist Helene Alving

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Western Drama through the Ages explains, ‘‘not only the things we inherit from our parents—but by the ghosts of innumerable prejudices and beliefs—half-forgotten cruelties and betrayals—we may not even be aware of them—but they’re there just the same—and we can’t get rid of them. The whole world is haunted by the ghosts of the dead past.’’ Mrs. Alving has devoted her life to keeping her late husband’s sexual depravity and death from syphilis a secret from the world. Although she has come to doubt the values of her society, she still feels the need to placate them through acts of hypocrisy. Her attempts to free herself, unlike Nora Helmer’s, do not succeed, and she is left at the end, alone with her syphilitic son, unable to decide whether she should euthanize him as he requested. But Ibsen was both too deeply ironic and iconoclastic to leave his liberal positions unproblematized. In The Wild Duck (Vildanden, 1884), a young firebrand sets out to free a family from its ‘‘ghosts,’’ only to destroy it through his revelations. Here Ibsen questions one of the common assumptions of realism: is the public representation of the unvarnished truth salutary, or do people need illusions to survive? Ibsen’s ruminations on this question have stimulated both realists and theatricalists alike: the plays of Luigi Pirandello in Italy, Jean Giraudoux and Jean Anouilh in France, Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (Ma dne, 1902) in Russia, and Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (1939) and Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) in the United States. In the last decade of his career, Ibsen’s plots grew ever simpler, and his realism became more suffused with symbolism. In his penultimate drama, John Gabriel Borkman (1896), most of the action takes place long before the curtain’s rise, as it shows the emergence of a disgraced business tycoon from years of selfimposed reclusiveness on the last night of his life. The dramatic action is spare; there is no way to expiate the damage that Borkman has done, neither to himself nor to the two sisters who were rivals for his love. The frigid, nocturnal, Norwegian setting is as much an expression of the characters’ congealed emotional lives as a realistic setting. As we hear Borkman’s pacing in the upstairs gallery of his house, it is mingled with the strains of Camille Saint-Sae¨ns’s ‘‘Danse macabre’’ on the piano, a fitting accompaniment to his death-in-life. The fusion of realistic psychology and setting with symbolism and highly imagistic language—a form of poetic realism—in Ibsen’s late plays opened new territory for dramatic experimentation.

Zola Ibsen was clearly the predominant realistic dramatist of the second half of the century, but he wrote no manifestos on behalf of the new drama. That role fell to Emile Zola (1840–1902), who became not only the most influential polemicist in favor of realistic experimentation, but was the founder of a particular subspecies of realism, called naturalism.

Realism Influenced by the growth of scientific method and the positivist theories of Auguste Comte, Zola believed that modern drama needed to become more scientific. He urged a meticulous, emotionally detached observation of all aspects of human life, a recognition of the determination of all human behavior by heredity and environment, and a repudiation of melodramatic contrivance. Coining a much-used term, he argued that the theater should become a ‘‘slice of life’’ (tranche de vie). Although his few ventures into drama were largely unsuccessful, and the best-known of them, The´re´se Raquin (1873), owes its continued revival more to its elements of rip-roaring melodrama than its detached observation of everyday life, Zola’s insistence on the importance of environmental and hereditary factors proved to be highly influential.

Hauptmann Nowhere can Zola’s naturalistic theory be seen more clearly than in the early plays of Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946). Before Sunrise (Vor Sonnenaufgang, 1889) not only was the first German naturalistic drama, but remains one of the most theatrically vital examples of the movement. A young socialist doing research on conditions in Silesia falls in love with the radiant, vulnerable daughter of a vulgar, degenerate, and alcoholic farming family. He offers the only escape for her from this sordid environment, but when he learns from the local doctor the story of her family’s decline, he flees, fearing her genetic inheritance will inevitably doom her. Abandoned, she stabs herself with her father’s hunting knife, as her drunken father is heard approaching, singing a lascivious song. Not only did Hauptmann go beyond Ibsen in his aggressive depiction of sociopathic behavior, but in his meticulous recording and theatrical use of Silesian dialect he is far removed from Ibsen’s more decorous, middle-class dialogue. The Weavers (Die Weber, 1892) remains Hauptmann’s boldest experiment in naturalism. Based on the unsuccessful uprising of Silesian weavers in 1844, Hauptmann rejects the commonplace notion that a play must have a single protagonist, choosing the weavers and their families as a collective protagonist. He paints their misery in unsparing and disturbing touches: an old man, for example, kills the family dog in order to stave off starvation, only to find that his stomach, long grown unused to meat, cannot keep it down. The Weavers rejected the contrivances of melodrama in favor of an epic structure, tied naturalism to the literature of social protest, and asserted the legitimacy of a drama that focused on the downtrodden. Although some later critics have argued that the play’s pessimism undercuts its revolutionary potential, this groundbreaking drama remains one of the most influential texts of the modern theater.

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Strindberg Although a follower of Zola only in the early part of his career, August Strindberg (1849–1912) contributed memorably to the naturalist with a handful of one-acts and two full-length dramas. The first, The Father (Fadren, 1887), develops from a simple observation drawn from human biology: a woman knows she is the mother of her child, but a man has no such certainty. This simple fact comes into play as Captain Adolf and his wife Laura fight for control over their daughter’s education. Laura suggests that Adolf has no authority in this matter; after all, the child may not be his. The suspicion drives the father to insanity, and he dies in his wife’s arms bound in a straitjacket, while she explains that the annihilating suspicions she raised were, in fact, totally unfounded. In The Father, the basic animosity between men and women is grounded in biology. Strindberg’s most famous naturalistic drama, Miss Julie (Frøken Julie, 1888) is notable for its preface as well as the play itself. Strindberg argues that human beings are not simple ‘‘characters,’’ defined by a single predominant quality, in the way that Molie`re’s Harpagon in The Miser is completely defined by his miserliness. The characters of Miss Julie are so complex and psychologically discontinuous that they might better be called ‘‘characterless.’’ He explains: ‘‘My souls (characters) are conglomerations of past and present cultural phases, bits from books and newspapers, scraps of humanity, pieces torn from fine clothes and become rags, patched together as is the human soul.’’ Decades before the cubists would discover pictorial collage, Strindberg put forward the notion of the dramatic figure as collage. In Miss Julie, Strindberg creates two such collages: the imperious, flighty, and impulsive daughter of an aristocrat, and her father’s ambitious, passionate but ultimately servile valet. Strindberg puts these two highly unstable figures into the sexually charged atmosphere of a Midsummer Eve and demonstrates the influence of the milieu on their self-destructive behavior. Not only did Strindberg fundamentally complicate the whole idea of dramatic character, but he also questioned conventional wisdom about heterosexual relationships, suggesting that deep-seated animosities and drives for power might be at least as important as sexual attraction and affection.

Realism in Russian Drama In Russia, realistic theater developed in opposition to a highly repressive government that employed strong stage censorship. Nikolai Gogol (1809–52) explained the impetus behind his masterpiece, The Inspector General (Revizor, 1836):

Realism In The Inspector General I had decided to collect into one heap everything I knew about what was bad in Russia, all the injustices that were being done at times and in places where there was the greatest need for justice; and laugh at it all at once.

Virtually unique in its time for its lack of a single sympathetic character, Gogol creates a provincial town rife with corruption and petty rivalries, and then introduces Khlestakov, a mindless, amoral fop whom the townspeople mistakenly take for a government inspector from St. Petersburg. Falling over themselves to curry favor with Khlestakov, they reveal the depths of their venality, from which he is only too willing to profit, before skipping town. Only too late do the villagers discover that they have been duped, and that the real government inspector is on his way. In its lack of sentimentality, romance, and poetic justice, The Inspector General established a tradition of Russian realism independent of French models, more grotesque in its humor, colloquial in its dialogue, and less dependent on intricate plotting. Deeply influenced by Gogol, Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817–1903) explored the realm in which realistic observation can uncover a demonic, nightmarish world. Accused of being the murderer of his French mistress, SukhovoKobylin suffered through seven years of arrests, investigations, and trials before being acquitted. In the meantime, he gained firsthand knowledge of the graft, corruption, and bureaucratic horrors of the tsarist justice system. In his trilogy, composed of Kerechinsky’s Wedding (Svad’ba Krechinsogo, 1854), The Case (Delo, 1861), and Tarelkin’s Death (Smert’ Tarelkina, 1869), he starts with the witty intrigue of a French comedy, deepens progressively into realism as he dramatizes the struggles of an innocent man in the grasp of the legal system, and finally passes into grotesque fantasy. This brilliant trilogy, sadly neglected in the English-speaking world, encapsulates much of the history of nineteenth and twentieth century drama, and like Franz Kafka, questions the boundaries commonly placed between realistic depiction and hallucination. Needless to say, the trilogy did not please the censors; it took decades before unexpurgated productions were permitted. Alexander Ostrovsky (1823–86) remains by far the most prolific of major Russian playwrights, writing comedies, tragedies, historical dramas, fairy tale plays, and adaptations of foreign dramas. His first play, a satire of bankruptcy fraud, did not lead to a production, but to police surveillance instead. His comedies of Moscow life usually chronicle the lives of parvenu merchants and tradespeople who lived on the unfashionable south side of the Moskva river, a reactionary class of petty tyrants who lorded it over their employees at work and their families at home. In Too Clever by Half, also known in English as The Diary of a Scoundrel (Na vsiakogao mudresta dovol’no prostoty, 1868), Gloumov, an impecunious, ingenious, and unprincipled young man, rises up through the vanity, greed, and stupidity of Moscow society while recording his brutally honest

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Western Drama through the Ages impressions in a journal. When the journal is discovered and read aloud, everyone is shocked, and Gloumov castigates them for their hypocrisy—he’s written no more, he asserts, than they all habitually say behind each other’s backs— and storms out. The next moment, however, they decide to recall Gloumov: after all, who would want to live without such a fascinating young man? In The Forest (Les, 1870), Ostrovsky’s critique moves to a country estate. Two impoverished itinerant actors arrive at the estate of a wealthy aunt, only to see how monetary concerns stunt the capacity for compassion there. After arranging the betrothal of two young lovers, one of whom was driven to attempt suicide by the soulless machinations around her, the penniless actors depart, but not before delivering a stinging diatribe against the inhuman values they have encountered there—a speech, it is pointed out, memorized from Friedrich Schiller’s classic play of revolt, The Robbers. At once a scathing satire of commercial values and a heartfelt tribute to the humanizing values of the stage, The Forest remains one of Ostrovsky’s most widely performed works. The power of petty tyrants grows lethal in The Storm (Groza, 1859), Ostrovsky’s greatest tragedy. In a backward, uneducated, superstitious town on the Volga river, Katerina’s life is made unendurable by her vicious and dictatorial mother-in-law, who maintains that a household can only be kept orderly by fear. Katerina’s sister-in-law urges her to live a life of deception. ‘‘Our entire household is built on lies,’’ she explains. ‘‘I never used to lie, but I learned how to, when I had to.’’ But Katerina, a deeply religious, imaginative, and high-strung woman, is incapable of developing such defenses. She briefly finds romance in an extramarital affair, but breaks down and confesses to her husband and mother-in-law. This confession, set in an old arcade painted with scenes of the Last Judgment, haunted by the hellfire-and-brimstone ravings of an old madwoman, and underscored by the coming of a thunderstorm, pushes realism to the verge of expressionism in its intensity. Unable to live with the brutality that follows her confession, she drowns herself in the Volga. Often praised as Ostrovsky’s greatest achievement, it inspired a famous operatic adaptation by Czech composer Leosˇ Jana´cˇek, Ka´tˇa Kabanovaa´ (1921).

Turgenev Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) primarily devoted his career to writing fiction, but his delicate, probing comedy, A Month in the Country (Mesyats v derevene, 1850) creates a nuance and restraint far removed from Ostrovsky’s more straightforward dramaturgy. Amidst the routine amusements of a country estate—card games, embroidery, long walks, and gossip—Natalya Petrovna, the bored mistress of the estate, neglected by her husband, gradually discovers that she has become infatuated with the young, unsophisticated student who is tutoring her son. The intensity of her emotion could easily become the stuff of melodrama, but Turgenev’s

Realism characters are individuals, far removed from the simple types of good and evil common to that genre. Natalya is no exemplar of virtue—she seriously contemplates marrying off her seventeen year-old ward to a gauche and simpleminded old landowner when she suspects her of being a rival—but neither is she a villain, maliciously determined to thwart young love. As it turns out, none of the potential love affairs come to fruition: the suitor and tutor leave, the ward in a fit of pique determines to marry the doltish landowner after all, and Natalya is left alone. The problems encountered by A Month in the Country on its way to theatrical acceptance show how much resistance realist playwrights encountered in nineteenth century Russia. In 1850, Turgenev submitted the play to the censors, who demanded many changes, most importantly that Natalya become a widow, to remove any suggestions of immorality. Even after Turgenev submitted to their demands, it was not allowed to be published until 1855, and not until 1869 was the husband permitted back into the script. When it made its way to the stage in 1872, it was poorly received, and only received acclaim a decade later.

Chekhov In the four late plays of Anton Chekhov (1860–1904)—The Seagull (Chayka, 1896), Uncle Vanya (Dyadya Vanya, 1899), Three Sisters (Tri sestry, 1901), and The Cherry Orchard (Vishnyovy sad, 1904)—realism reaches its purest and most profound expression. Characters are highly individualized. Plotting appears both unimportant and effortless. No longer constructing plays around a single protagonist, Chekhov presents households in all their crossed purposes, mixed intentions, and blind spots. It seems at times that we are looking at daily life in all its casual disarray, but closer examination reveals that every moment is exquisitely crafted. The characters are no longer persistently engaged with each other in close conversation; the dialogue is rich in non sequiturs and misunderstandings. They often seem not be conducting interchanges with each other, but constructing simultaneous monologues. If there is a fundamental conflict in these plays, it is no longer between a hero and a villain, but between human beings and time. The characters feel their powerlessness before the losses that time inevitably exacts. Irina, the youngest of the three Prozorov sisters, feels it intensely at 23: Oh where has everything gone? Where is it? Oh my God, my God, I’ve forgotten everything—everything . . .everything’s confused . . .I can’t remember anything— I forget things everyday. Life is passing me by, never to come back.

Time not only takes things from us, it even takes away the memory of them. The aged bachelor Chebutykin asserts repeatedly that he loved the Prozorovs’ mother, but, when asked if she loved him, he cannot remember whether she did or not.

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Western Drama through the Ages Chekhov enriched the modern theater by his development of subtext, the unarticulated message that lies beneath the spoken text. Before Chekhov, dramatic characters usually mean what they say, unless they are consciously dissembling. But in his plays, people often do not understand what they feel—or what they say. Masha is haunted by some lines in a poem by Pushkin during the first act of Three Sisters and does not know why. Yelena has every reason to deceive herself about her feelings for Astrov, the dissipated doctor in Uncle Vanya. Chekhov’s characters, like us, are incapable of fully understanding either themselves or each other, which is one of the reasons they continue to fascinate us with the illusion of their humanity. Psychological realism can go no further. Chekhov’s plays finish demolishing the neoclassical division of genres established in the Renaissance. He encourages us to see the actions and characters in his plays as at once comic and tragic: not a sentimental muddling of the two, but the sharp, simultaneous existence of two contrasting perspectives. In The Cherry Orchard, the Ranevskys lose their family estate because they are temperamentally incapable of doing anything to save it. From one perspective, they are self-indulgent, eccentric comic figures: Mme. Ranevsky is scatterbrained and totally impractical, her brother, Gaev, wanders about aimlessly, imagining games of billiards and calling the shots aloud as he ‘‘plays.’’ From this point of view, they get nothing less than they deserve. At the same time, however, we feel the full, devastating weight of their loss; it is impossible not to feel deeply for them as they leave their childhood home for the last time. The interpenetration of comedy and tragedy is both complete and seamless, opening a line of development in the modern theater from realism to the absurdism of Samuel Beckett. The predominance of tragicomic mixtures in modern drama, would be unthinkable without Chekhov.

Gorky Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) was widely seen as Chekhov’s successor. First attracting widespread attention with the international success of his slice-of-life drama set in a flophouse, The Lower Depths (Ma dne, 1902), Gorky grafted Chekhovian techniques onto an explicit political agenda—something his predecessor avoided. The delicate strength of Chekhov is replaced by a harsher, more judgmental tone, but Gorky’s relative crudeness (and what dramatist of the twentieth century does not seem crude, compared to Chekhov?) carries sharp psychological and social insights, passion, and theatrical power. Gorky’s greatest portraits are not of the workers and peasants, whom he tended to idealize, but of the ineffectual intellectuals, and, above all, the crude, vigorous, brutal merchants and tradespeople, theatrical grandchildren of Ostrovsky’s bourgeois dictators. In The Zykovs (Zykoy, 1903), timber merchant Antipa Zykov meets the innocent, convent-bred lass to whom his son is engaged. Antipa invites her into his office,

Realism and a little later makes the announcement that she is not going to wed his son, but himself. For all his coarseness, we are drawn to his honesty and opposition to a stagnant world. The title character in Vassa Zheleznova (1910; revised, 1935) has built a shipping company on the Volga with seemingly inexhaustible energy and few scruples. When her brutal, dissipated husband is arrested on a morals charge, she persuades him to commit suicide rather than disgrace the family. In the final scene, Vassa begins to lose her hold over the world she has so singlemindedly constructed, but she fights on relentlessly until dropping dead at her desk of a coronary. Gorky enthusiastically supported the Russian Revolution, and his realist plays, based on analyses of class conflict, were taken as models of socialist realism, when it was promulgated by Andrey Zhdanov as Communist Party orthodoxy at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. The result, a stultified, propagandistic drama populated with an idealized proletariat and melodramatic villains, bore little or no resemblance to Gorky’s work, was anything but realistic, and left Soviet drama imprisoned in a lifeless schematic for decades.

Austrian Dramatic Realism ¨ do¨n von Horva´th (1901–38) developed a new form of Austrian playwright O critical realism in his dramatic chronicles of the petty bourgeoisie and proletariat between the two World Wars, including Tales from the Vienna Woods (Geschichte aus dem Wiener Wald, 1931), Kasimir und Karoline (Kasimir and Karoline, 1932), and Glaube Liebe Hoffnung (Faith Love Hope, 1933). An innovator in dramatic dialogue, Horva´th explored the ability of language to deceive; how brutality can lie behind sentimentality, and resentment behind protestations of affection. For him, speech is not the spontaneous and direct expression of thought and feeling; it is something acquired. As a result, what we say may not correspond to what we actually believe, not because we are hypocritical, but because our culture’s language indoctrinates us to our culture’s ideology. Horva´ th’s characters cannot express themselves directly. Rather, their minds are cluttered with proverbs, quotations, and bromides. Surrounded on all sides by the kitsch, propaganda, and detritus of mass culture, they often find themselves closest to their real feelings not in speech, but in silence. In the pauses that punctuate a Horva´th play, we are led to perceive the emotional truth that the language is incapable of conveying— the inarticulate struggle of the unconscious with consciousness. Horva´th reveals the hopelessness and cruelty that lurk behind the apparently benign artifacts of popular culture, whether Strauss waltzes in Tales from the Vienna Woods or the Oktoberfest in Kasimir and Karoline. Lacking the language that would help them come to an understanding of the cultural and economic forces that constrain them, his characters often move in circles, unable to liberate themselves.

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Western Drama through the Ages Horva´th’s career was undermined by the rise of the Nazis and cut short by an accident at the age of thirty-seven. His plays were largely forgotten until the late 1960s, when he enjoyed a major renaissance in the German-speaking theater, where he continues to be performed frequently. His insights into the ideological force of language influenced a new generation of critical realist playwrights, including Martin Sperr (b. 1944), Franz Xavier Kroetz (b. 1946), and playwright and filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–82).

English Dramatic Realism On the English stage of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, realism largely followed the French model of Dumas and Augier, with the decorous values of middle-class gentility acting as a brake on realistic experimentation. Naturalism was far too raw to exercise any influence. Although W. Somerset Maugham (1874– 1965) showed the influence of French naturalism in his early novels, he carefully kept it out of his commercially successful plays, substituting a cynical detachment that could range from brittle high comedy to trenchant satire. Lady Frederick (1907) appalled some and titillated many with its scene in which an adventuress sets out to disillusion her young admirer by showing him how she uses makeup to correct the ravages of time each morning at her dressing table. The Constant Wife (1926) played a similar game by showing a wife who unflappably accepts her husband’s infidelity and attains sufficient financial independence to do the same, if she pleases. The modern wife, she explains, is nothing but ‘‘a prostitute who doesn’t deliver the goods.’’ Although Our Betters (1917), a satire of American heiresses married to European aristocrats, was kept off the London stage by the censors for its depictions of promiscuity and gained some notoriety for its use of the word ‘‘slut,’’ it soon became accepted as one of his finest plays. But critics sometimes argued over whether or not Maugham was a realist at all—was he, rather, a highly skilled contriver of theatrically effective entertainments with the merest veneer of modern fashions and manners? George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) claimed to be an ‘‘Ibsenite,’’ and was an important defender of the Norwegian playwright in England. But his own plays, with the exception of his early Plays Unpleasant (1898), are peopled with hyperarticulate characters who inhabit a world of rhetorical pyrotechnics and intellectual idiosyncrasies that bear little resemblance to realistically conceived portraits. John Galsworthy (1867–1933) articulated a realist program for himself when he observed that a playwright had three options: (1) following what the audience believes, (2) expressing what he believes, or (3) setting out ‘‘no cut-and-dried codes, but the phenomena of life and character, selected and combined, but not distorted, by the dramatist’s outlook.’’ The result, at its best, is a somewhat detached, even-handed imaginative consideration of a conflict, similar to Ibsen’s

Realism social dramas in form, though lacking their psychological depth. Strife (1907) invites comparison with Hauptmann’s The Weavers. While Hauptmann is furiously (and magnificently) partisan in his espousal of the weavers’ cause, Galsworthy weighs the merits and defects of both sides, and sees the common besetting fault as a failure to compromise. The Skin Game (1920) shows the conflict between landed gentry and new money; both sides become progressively debased morally by their intransigence in a fight over real estate. Although infrequently revived today, Galsworthy’s best plays won widespread approval for their compassionate, liberal views and thoughtfulness. Chekhov’s influence can easily be seen in the minimally plotted, finely atmospheric plays of N.C. Hunter (Waters of the Moon, 1951, and A Day By the Sea, 1953) and J.B. Priestley (Time and the Conways, 1934, and Eden End, 1937), but both have a tendency toward nostalgia and sentimentality not found in the Russian master. Terence Rattigan (1911–77), a more psychologically probing playwright than either Hunter or Priestley, became the preeminent realistic playwright on the West End stage after World War II. His plays explore the sexual agony and self-hatred of deeply troubled people in dialogue that is deceptively simple, but subtextually rich. The Browning Version (1948), a masterpiece of one-act play construction, poignantly dramatizes the last day in the career of a desperately lonely and unloved schoolteacher. Hester Collyer in The Deep Blue Sea (1952) has left her husband for a man who is now about to leave her. Tempted by suicide, she is not only devastated by the prospect of being alone, but unable to accept the intensity of her sexual desire. Separate Tables (1954), set in a residential hotel for downwardly mobile members of the postwar middle class, makes a plea for toleration of misfits and sexual outsiders. Rattigan’s restrained vision of middle-class gentility was directly challenged by John Osborne (1929–94). Look Back In Anger (1956), with its protagonist from the working class spewing diatribe and invective, had a vigor and immediacy that suddenly made Rattigan appear old-fashioned. Osborne opened the way toward a more loosely plotted, less decorous realism that reflected the lives of the disadvantaged and marginalized while, ironically, turning his attention to the affluent and privileged in The Hotel in Amsterdam (1968) and West of Suez (1971). From the late 1950s through the 1970s, both the subject matter and forms of British stage realism broadened. The deeply compassionate plays of Arnold Wesker (b. 1932) are best known for combining socialist themes and Chekhovian techniques in such dramas as Roots (1959), The Friends (1970), and The Old Ones (1972). Wesker’s plays insist on the need for utopian values despite the failure of all utopian schemes. David Storey (b. 1933) often explores the alienation of upwardly mobile young people from their working-class backgrounds, most notably in In Celebration (1969) and The March on Russia (1989), yet he also gained praise for The Changing Room (1971), a ‘‘slice-of-life’’ set in a locker room during

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Western Drama through the Ages a rugby match. Alan Ayckbourn (b. 1939) infuses highly theatrical dramatic structures with deft sketches of suburbia. In Absent Friends (1975), Just Between Ourselves (1978), and Woman in Mind (1986), farcical techniques exist cheekby-jowl with cruelty and pathos. As with Maugham, critics disagree as to how much of Ayckbourn’s work is due to realistic observation and how much to theatrical contrivance, but his best work renders not merely the surface, but also the psychological depths of suburban claustrophobia and alienation. Film director and playwright Mike Leigh (b. 1943) also mixes comedy and bleakness in his explorations of middle- and working-class anomie, but his approach avoids the ingenious complexity of Ayckbourn, preferring to produce an air of improvisational openness. Starting with Bleak Moments (1970), he actually has developed his plays out of lengthy improvisation periods with his actors, making them collaborators in the development of their characters. Both Abigail’s Party (1977) and Ecstasy (1979) unfold during a single, intimate gathering, and show the characters lurching into embarrassing self-disclosures and emotional eruptions under the pressure of social interaction and the loosening effects of alcohol.

U.S. Dramatic Realism In the United States, scenic realism was received enthusiastically early on, and at least a veneer of realism quickly became required for most successful commercial drama in the twentieth century. Whether softened with humor and sentiment or energized with touches of melodrama, realistic drama has remained dominant in American theater, movies, and television. But alongside its commercial dominance, it has served other, sometimes oppositional ends. The influence of Ibsen’s social dramas on American theater can be seen in an ongoing American tradition of realistic protest plays. Rachel Crothers used realism to assess the position of women in society and attacked the double standard in A Man’s World (1910), and she considered the obstacles to a creative woman’s career in He and She (1920). Susan Glaspell made a chilling point of male obliviousness to domestic abuse in Trifles (1916), and attacked abuses of free speech in the name of patriotism in Inheritors (1921). Before turning to the romantic verse dramas for which he is best known, Maxwell Anderson collaborated with Laurence Stallings on What Price Glory? (1924), a play about the senselessness of war, and with Harold Nickerson on Gods of the Lightning (1928), a protest against the trial and executions of Sacco and Vanzetti. John Wexley dramatized conditions on death row in The Last Mile (1930) and protested against the Scottsboro case in They Shall Not Die (1934). Paul Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun (1936) condemned the inhumanity of chain gangs in the Southern penal system. Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934) and Robert Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy (1953) both approached the topic of homophobia,

Realism however gingerly. Arthur Miller used the Salem Witch trials to attack the McCarthy hearings in The Crucible (1953). Lorraine Hansberry spoke out against racism in A Raisin in the Sun (1959). In the early years of the AIDS pandemic, Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart (1985) spoke out against public indifference and prejudice against HIV-positive people. While some of these plays move away from realism in melodramatic confrontations between good and evil, they show the power of realism to function with journalistic immediacy and emotional power. Other playwrights, no less politically committed, followed the model of Chekhov. The most famous of these is Clifford Odets, who translated Chekhov’s non sequiturs and loving attention to minutiae into Brooklynese, and softened Gorky’s revolutionary fervor into injunctions like ‘‘Do what is in your heart and you carry in yourself a revolution.’’ In Awake and Sing and Paradise Lost (both 1935) he wedded the vigor of American urban slang to a poignant desire for a life. More intellectually sophisticated than Odets but no less poetic, Theodore Ward revealed Depression-era Americans divided among faith in the American dream, socialism, and Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement in his unjustly neglected Big White Fog (1938). The two American realist playwrights who have enjoyed the highest critical esteem, however, are not known for social dramas. Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) was a tireless experimenter, but his best-known and most admired plays are in the naturalist tradition. An admirer of Strindberg and Hauptmann, O’Neill created characters whose fates are determined by forces beyond their control. Plot becomes negligible as the playwright devotes himself to depicting characters who are incapable of change. ‘‘The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future too.’’ remarks the drug-addicted mother, Mary Tyrone, in his most fully realized play, A Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1939–41). ‘‘We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.’’ Eugene O’Neill One of many playwrights influenced by Freudian psychoanalytic theory, O’Neill rewrote Aeschylus’s Oresteia as, above all, the working out of Oedipal conflicts in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). In his reworking of the story of the House of Atreus, set in New England after the Civil War, Electra loves her father and despises her mother, while Orestes does the reverse. After their parents’ deaths, brother and sister each increasingly come to resemble their same-sex parent, and their scenes become infused with a barely repressed incestuous desire. One’s fate, O’Neill suggests, is to become one’s parent. O’Neill was the son of a successful actor who triumphed in melodramatic portrayals, and O’Neill never rid himself of a penchant for a drama of magnitude that sometimes ill-sorted with his realistic impulses. Of all the major realistic

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Western Drama through the Ages dramatists, none was more driven to invest realism with mythic stature and epic breadth: both Mourning Becomes Electra and Strange Interlude (1928) are written in nine acts—a trilogy of three-act plays. The size of his vision, however, was not always matched by the depth of his insights. In Dynamo (1929), for example, O’Neill tried to comment on modern spirituality by having his protagonist worship a maternal goddess in the form of a huge electric generator. In his greatest achievement, however, he kept a tight rein on his ambitions, reducing the cast to five, the time to a one day, and the setting to a single, realistically rendered parlor. Long Day’s Journey Into Night, his most autobiographical work, uncovers the pattern of unconscious betrayals in the history of a family as it slowly comes to the surface through their interactions. There are no melodramatic revelations, no pistol shots or deaths. The play moves into the depths of night and despair as the fog encircles the house—a masterful example of O’Neill’s talent for settings that are at once realistically detailed, revelatory of character, and richly atmospheric. Tennessee Williams O’Neill’s most notable successor was Tennessee Williams (1911–83), whose critical reputation and frequent success in revivals seems have outstripped his predecessor. Williams takes material that could easily be developed naturalistically—the descent of a genteel schoolteacher into promiscuity, alcoholism, and insanity in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), or the futile efforts of an aging hustler to recapture the dreams of his youth, only to meet the certainty of castration in Sweet Bird of Youth (1959)—and transform them into plays of poetic realism through heightened language and lush atmospheres. ‘‘Don’t you just love those long rainy afternoons in New Orleans,’’ remarks Streetcar’s heroine, Blanche DuBois, ‘‘when an hour isn’t just an hour—but a little piece of eternity dropped into your hands—and who knows what to do with it?’’ The transformation of sordid reality by the poetic imagination is Williams’s major theme, one that perhaps makes him at heart less a realist than a romantic. Since the 1950s, realism as a style in the American theater has lost its edge. Perhaps its very ubiquity has rendered it insipid. Perhaps it has become so widely accepted that it has lost its ability to surprise us. Certainly no contemporary American realist deserves a place alongside Ibsen, Chekhov, Horva´th and the other masters of realism’s heyday, from 1850 to 1950. Although there are many skilled writers continuing in the tradition, the theatrical excitement now makes its presence felt in more overtly theatrical styles. But realism as an impulse inevitably remains—and will continue to remain—an important ingredient in theatrical experience.

Realism

FURTHER READING Murphy, Brenda. American Realism and American Drama, 1880–1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Styan, J. L. Modern Drama in Theory and Practice: Realism and Naturalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Wellek, Rene´. ‘‘The Concept of Realism in Literary Scholarship.’’ Concepts of Criticism. Edited by Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1963.

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Realism: A Survey of Modern Plays Bruce Mann

Realism in drama emerges in full force during the late nineteenth century, propelled by new intellectual currents that focus attention on society and the complexities of human social behavior. Rejecting the conventions of romantic opera and melodrama—heroes and villains, exotic settings, and happy endings—playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906), August Strindberg (1849–1912), and Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) create plays that, in production, give spectators the illusion of eavesdropping on scenes from everyday life. Contributing to this illusion are psychologically complex characters, ordinary prose dialogue, lifelike settings, expressive props, and artfully constructed plots that criticize social conditions and leave audiences with unresolved questions to consider. The prototypical realistic drama is Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). Its main character, Nora Helmer, brings romantic notions to her marriage with Torvald, a straitlaced pillar of Norwegian society, but during the play, she comes to realize that her father and husband, representatives of society, see her only as a plaything. Nora experiences a profound recognition and slams the door at the end as she leaves her ‘‘doll house’’ and family to learn about herself and the world at large. Brilliantly crafted, although not without vestiges of melodrama, A Doll’s House inaugurates the mature phase of dramatic realism, with its symbolic, detailed setting and evocative props—a Christmas tree, macaroons, and a dance costume— all of which Ibsen uses to comment on Nora’s awareness of society’s negative influence on her. While many realistic plays share a theme of romantic ideas colliding with reality, realism cannot be reduced to a formula. For example, The Cherry Orchard (1904), a Russian drama by Chekhov, bears little resemblance to A Doll’s House.

Realism: A Survey of Modern Plays ‘‘Let the things that happen on stage be just as complex and yet as simple as they are in real life,’’ writes the playwright. ‘‘For instance, people are having a meal at a table, just having a meal, but at the same time their happiness is being created or their lives are being smashed up.’’ In Chekhov’s play, nothing seems to happen, but audiences nevertheless are moved by the loss of an aristocratic family’s estate while members of an upwardly mobile class gain in status. Utilizing multiple points of view, changes of focus, an abundance of subtext, and internalized action, Chekhov chronicles a society in transition and communicates the sensation of life as we live it. Fueling the rise of realism in drama are revolutionary currents of thought in science, philosophy, and the social sciences that find human beings to be less heroic than defenseless and subject to a myriad of determinants beyond their control. In France, Auguste Comte (1798–1857) developed scientific procedures to study social problems, thereby founding modern sociology, and in England, Charles Darwin (1809–92) wrote The Origin of Species (1859), arguing that humans, like other animals, depend on heredity and adaptation to survive. In short order, Herbert Spencer eagerly applied Darwin’s concept of ‘‘survival of the fittest’’ to the social realm. In Das Kapital (1867), political economist Karl Marx (1818–83) predicted social unrest—a class struggle—in capitalist societies, because workers inevitably would overthrow the bourgeoisie. French philosopher Hippolyte Taine (1828–93) claims that human beings are little more than machines, the products of three factors: la race (heredity), le milieu (environment), and le moment (historical situation). And psychologist Sigmund Freud posits the unconscious mind in every individual, filled with irrational, violent needs and desires that can overpower the conscious mind. For serious playwrights, these disturbing insights cry out for dramatic treatment. Also contributing to the success of realism were numerous theatrical innovations. Smaller theaters, such as the The´aˆtre Libre in Paris (1887), the Independent Theatre in London (1891), and the Provincetown Players on Cape Cod (1915), opened around the world, providing acting spaces suited to the intimate nature of realism. Improved scenography and stage lighting allowed for creation of more realistic and atmospheric settings, and new acting techniques appropriate to realism, most notably by Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theatre, worked to enhance the appeal and understanding of these kinds of plays. Other examples of early dramatic realism are Maxim Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902) and Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1888). (Both are also considered examples of ‘‘naturalism,’’ a term coined by Emile Zola to designate a more intense form of realism that depicts human beings as suffocated by a hostile society and robbed of their souls.) Later plays containing realistic elements or otherwise indebted to realism could include Susan Glaspell’s Trifles (1916), Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing! (1935), Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934) and The Autumn

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Western Drama through the Ages Garden (1951), Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941), Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959), Arnold Wesker’s Chicken Soup with Barley (1960), Marsha Norman’s ‘night, Mother (1983), and August Wilson’s Fences (1985) and The Piano Lesson (1987). More than a century after A Doll’s House, realism remains a dominant style in today’s theater (and perhaps is the dominant style in film), even after a host of movements that emerged to oppose it: symbolism, expressionism, surrealism, theatricalism, epic theater, and absurdism. But while realism has proven flexible enough to incorporate aspects of other styles, demonstrating its versatility, it now exerts an undue influence over modern theater, not unlike that of Shakespeare over nineteenth century drama. The ghosts of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov still hover, recognizably, over contemporary theater. Audiences have become entirely comfortable with realistic plays, and realism’s thematic material has become shopworn, limiting its effectiveness as a means of exploring social environments.

FURTHER READING Drake, Durant and Arthur O. Lovejoy. Essays in Critical Realism. London: MacMillan, 1920. Norris, Christopher. Truth Matters: Realism, Anti-Realism and Response-Dependence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002 Seigel, B.T. Aesthetic Realism: Three Instances. New York: Terrain Gallery and Definition Press, 1961.


Surrealism Robert F. Gross

‘‘Beautiful as the accidental meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on the dissection table’’ exclaimed symbolist poet Comte de Lautre´amont. His arresting description of a strange new kind of beauty is often quoted as a prophetic evocation of the surrealist movement that was to come. While classical aesthetics had stressed balance, form, proportion, and above all, the meticulous eye of the artist, Lautre´amont praised disjunction, chance, and the objects of mass production. The surrealist looks away from conventional definitions of beauty and meaning, exploring unconventional possibilities elsewhere: in mechanized objects, cliche´s, transgressive acts, nonsense—and, above all, in dreams. Surrealist playwrights break the standard rules of dramaturgy taught in schools and parroted by critics. Rather than causally developed plots, they write plays that unfold like dreams or pageants or strange, parodic fragments. Rather than psychologically complex characters, they create figures who are two-dimensional or unfold in continual flux. Rather than rational arguments, they spin out chains of associations. Instead of sketching out a play’s plot line in advance, they often allow themselves to be carried away through an uncensored flow of verbal associations known as ‘‘automatic writing.’’ The lines between male and female, past and future, life and death, animate and inanimate, are repeatedly dissolved. Influenced by psychoanalysis, the surrealists were fascinated with how dreams, drug-induced hallucinations, techniques of free association and the workings of chance could reveal the workings of the unconscious. Andre´ Breton (1896–1966), the chief apologist for the surrealist movement in France and selfappointed arbiter of surrealist orthodoxy (a strangely contradictory position), explained in the Surrealist Manifesto of 1924 that ‘‘Surrealism is based on the

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Western Drama through the Ages belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin all other psychic mechanisms once and for all, and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life.’’ Preferring the poetry of the unconscious to the instrumentality of consciousness, the fundamental impulses of the movement remained anarchic, even though some surrealists, including Breton, tried to link their efforts to communism. Rejecting all the assumptions of mainstream commercial and academic drama in the twentieth century, surrealism has produced few box-office successes. Indeed, its playwrights—a bright, audacious, and visionary lot—have generally spent their careers on the margins. And yet they have produced some of the most vital, insightful, and innovative theatrical work to appear since the beginning of the last century.

SURREALIST DRAMA AND PLAYWRIGHTS Strindberg Theatrical maverick August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (Ett Dro¨mspel, 1902) set the direction for surrealism with its explorations of the fluid and mysterious relationships between human life, theatrical representation, and dream. Rather than following the strict patterns of causality and probability that defined realistic drama, Strindberg explained: Anything can happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. Working with some unimportant actual events as a background, the imagination weaves them into new patterns—a mixture of memories, spontaneous notions, impossibilities, and improbabilities.

In A Dream Play decades can pass before our eyes in moments. A lawyer’s hands can grow stained and cracked with the crimes his clients confess to him. A palace can blossom from the manure of a garden. Strindberg does not merely blur the lines between life, theater, and dream; he renders them identical. It took more than a decade, however, for Strindberg’s visionary experiment to begin to be joined by similar experiments. The first notable examples of surrealism appeared, not in spoken drama, but in the French musical theater. The young poet and jack-of-all-artistic trades, Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) hoped to launch his celebrity by creating a new ballet for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes that would rival the controversy it had unleashed in 1913 with the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Cocteau wrote the scenario, enlisted Erik Satie to write the score, Leonid Massine to choreograph, and Pablo Picasso to design sets and costumes. Although Parade (1917) never provoked anywhere near the outrage that The Rite of Spring had, it diverged sufficiently from the expectations of the

Surrealism Ballets Russes’s patrons—who had swooned over the lush exoticism of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sche´he´razade and Stravinsky’s The Firebird—to spark some hostility.

Cocteau In French, a parade is an entertainment put on by circus performers outside the tent to lure customers inside. In Cocteau’s Parade, the performers include a pair of acrobats, a Chinese magician, and a ‘‘little American girl’’ in a sailor suit resembling the heroine of a silent film adventure serial. Promoting the attractions to be seen inside are the ‘‘Managers,’’ oversized three-dimensional cubist collages with hats and pipes, accompanied by Picasso’s cubist reinvention of a pantomime horse. Despite all the Managers’ efforts, however, they fail to make the customers realize that the ‘‘real’’ show is offstage. Erik Satie’s score, drawing on ragtime and popular dance forms, was overlaid (much to his consternation) with the sounds of sirens, whistles, and typewriters. Parade’s provocative intrusion of contemporary popular culture into the elite world of high culture became one of the defining characteristics of surrealist performance. The surrealists rejected what they considered the stultified decorum of bourgeois art to embrace the rougher vitality they found in the circus, music hall, movie theater, boxing ring, and jazz club. They praised the comedy of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers and the jazz dancing of Josephine Baker. They explored comic strips, silent movie serials, detective magazines, and pornography. The surrealists shared an aversion to high culture and bourgeois values with the contemporaneous Dada movement, but whereas the Dadaists aggressively attacked the status quo with its notions of anti-art, the surrealists were more inclined to champion the transformation of art rather than its obliteration. The term ‘‘surrealism’’ first appeared in the program notes to Parade by Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), arguably the first surrealist poet. Apollinaire praised the production’s fusion of decor with choreography in the cubist presentation of the Managers; he wrote that it led to a ‘‘kind of super-realism (sur-re´alisme), in which I see the starting point of a series of manifestations of the new spirit.’’ The new word soon was appropriated as the name of the fledgling artistic movement, though its meaning, as we shall see, quickly grew more complex and contested. Cocteau followed Parade with two further ventures into musical theater. Composer Darius Milhaud had returned from Brazil and had penned a lighthearted rondo inspired by the popular music he had heard there. Its title, The Ox on the Roof (Le Boeuf sur le Toit, 1920) was appropriated from a Brazilian song, as were some of the tunes. He had hoped that the score might inspire a film script by Charlie Chaplin, but Cocteau persuaded Milhaud to let him write a stage scenario for it. Cocteau set the piece in a fanciful evocation of an American speakeasy,

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Western Drama through the Ages with a boxer, a bookie, a society lady, a cross-dressing woman, and an African American dwarf among the clientele. The gamblers’ dice were large cardboard cubes, the cigarette smoke was indicated by five large rings hanging in the air, and the bartender wore a mask taken from a sculpture of the Roman emperor Hadrian’s paramour, Antinou¨s. When the policeman raided the illegal nightspot, it was suddenly transformed into a milk bar. After the policeman was decapitated by a fan, the woman in male drag danced with his head, a` la Salome, before returning it to its body. Resuscitated, he was handed a bill a yard long. Throughout the performance, acrobatic clowns wearing oversized masks moved in slow motion while Milhaud’s music rushed ahead cheerfully. In The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party (Les Marie´s de la Tour Eiffel, 1921), Cocteau collaborated with the group of young composers who called themselves ‘‘The Six’’ (Darius Milhaud, Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Louis Durey, and Germaine Tailleferre) to create a theatrical piece that played on the double meanings of the French word ‘‘cliche´ ’’—’’snapshot’’ and ‘‘trite expression.’’ It shows a bourgeois wedding party visiting the first platform on the Eiffel Tower on Bastille Day for a photographic group portrait. Two performers, dressed as phonographs, stand to either side of the stage, narrating the events and declaiming the masked dancers’ dialogue. The wedding party is described by the phonographs in a series of cliche´s: The Bride, gentle as a lamb. The Father-in-Law, rich as Croesus. The Bridegroom, handsome as Apollo. The Mother-in-Law, false as a bad penny. The General, stupid as a goose.

The party had planned to memorialize itself, but it turns out to be more difficult than anticipated. A hunter appears on the Eiffel Tower, stalking an ostrich that turns out to have emerged from the photographer’s camera when he asked a posing subject to ‘‘watch the birdie.’’ His attempts to take a photograph are interrupted as figures emerge from his apparatus: a bathing beauty, a lion, and the as yet unconceived child of the bridal pair. When the camera is finally working properly, he ‘‘takes’’ their picture, as they disappear inside. In a final transformation, the camera moves off like a railway train with the wedding party within it, waving their handkerchiefs at the audience as they exit. In Cocteau’s musical theater pieces, plot is reduced to little more than a succession of images. Characters, rather than being individualized, are easily recognizable types. The respectability of the bourgeoisie and figures of authority is mocked, while the louche and exotic are celebrated. The impersonal inventions of the modern world—the photograph and phonograph—are regarded ambivalently; they simultaneously mirror the soulless anonymity of the middle class and provide new forms of enchantment and artistic delight.

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Other French Surrealists in Drama The surrealists would continue to attack such institutions as the family, organized religion, formal education, and the state. Often they would mock the banalities of the commercial stage with its predictable, realistic style and narrow focus on domestic issues and adulterous intrigue. In Raymond Radiguet’s The Pelicans (Les Pe´lican, 1921), the dilemmas of the Pelican family parody those of domestic drama: the eminently respectable father wants his son to be a poet, only to learn that he wishes to be a jockey. His daughter wins the Christmas Day Swimming Race on the Seine, and incidentally saves a photographer who had tried to drown himself. ‘‘Miracle of miracles!’’ exclaims the overjoyed mother. ‘‘My daughter wins the first prize in swimming on the day when the Seine is frozen.’’ One of the most spritely surrealist send-ups of bourgeois norms was also one of the earliest; Guillaume Apollinaire had worked intermittently since 1903 on his drama, The Breasts of Tiresias (Les Mamelles de Tire´sias), and completed it in 1917. Set in a totally imaginary Zanzibar—inspired by a popular French game of chance, not the island in the Indian Ocean—its bored and discontented heroine opens her blouse to release her breasts, red and blue balloons, which she then explodes with a cigarette lighter. Immediately thereafter, she sprouts a beard and mustache, and takes the name ‘‘Tiresias.’’ Her husband, in turn, dresses in her skirts, takes up with a policeman, and soon finds himself able to give birth to 40,050 children a day—a talent that soon threatens Zanzibar with overpopulation. Disaster is averted, however, as husband and wife resume their previous sex roles and reunite. In The Mirror-Wardrobe One Fine Evening (L’Armoire a` Glace Un Beau Soir, 1923) Louis Aragon (1897–1982) begins with a hackneyed device borrowed from the commercial theater: the wife, wild-eyed, stands between an armoire and her husband, who suspects that her lover is hidden inside it. Expectations are quickly undermined as the conventional roles are reversed: the wife repeatedly urges the husband to open the wardrobe, while he is disinclined to do so. What could be a spoof, however, quickly deepens through Aragon’s use of richly imagistic language. The theme of the play becomes the erotic mystery of the Unknown. When the husband finally opens the wardrobe, the characters from the play’s prologue mysteriously emerge, hand-in-hand, dance a jig in the twilight, and listen to a song whose lyric summons up a dreamlike vision of desire: My arms of bark my arms of birds Clasp the air I breathe, Her two legs are a scissors On which the wind is cut. . .

Starting with theatrical cliche´ , Aragon undercuts both plot and character through seemingly unmotivated actions and disjunctive images. In so doing, he

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Western Drama through the Ages achieves the primary goal of the surrealist movement: to transcend everyday consciousness by tapping the unconscious. The French surrealist movement did little to support experimentation in the theater, due largely to the leadership of Andre´ Breton, who saw any collaboration with the theater hopelessly reactionary. He blasted Cocteau as ‘‘a notorious false poet, a versifier who happens to debase rather than elevate everything he touches.’’ In his Second Manifesto (1930), he expelled the two members of his circle who had been most involved in the theater: Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) and Roger Vitrac (1899–1952). Artaud, creator of the Theatre of Cruelty and author of the volume of visionary essays collected under the title The Theatre and Its Double, developed his own highly individual theory of the theater, more expressionist than surrealist, and became the most influential French theater theorist and practitioner of the twentieth century. Roger Vitrac, the author of The Mysteries of Love (Les Myste`res de l’Amour, 1937) and Victor or Power to the Children (Victor ou les Enfants au Pouvoir, 1937), became the only French surrealist playwright besides Cocteau to enjoy any success in the professional theater.

Witkiewicz and Dramatic Surrealism in Poland The master of surrealist dramaturgy in the years between World War I and World War II, however, was never involved in the internecine feuds of the Parisian art scene. In the Polish city of Zakopane, living most of his life in one or another of his mother’s boarding houses, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885– 1939) created the most extensive and stunning corpus of surrealist plays. Eccentric, provocative, and totally at odds with the Polish artistic establishment, Witkiewicz (or ‘‘Witkacy,’’ as he often called himself)—novelist, philosopher, painter, photographer, and, above all, dramatist—enjoyed little recognition during his lifetime, and his posthumous recognition was hindered by the authoritarian regimes that controlled cultural life in his native land for decades. It was not until 1956 that one of his plays was revived in Poland, but his work underwent a major rediscovery with the coming of the theater of the absurd and postmodernism. He is increasingly recognized as one of the leading playwrights of the twentieth century, with such masterpieces as They (Oni, 1920), Metaphysics of a TwoHeaded Calf (Metafizyka Dwuglowego Cielecia, 1921), The Water Hen (Kurka Wodna,, 1921), Janulka, Daughter of Fidezko (Janulka, Corka Fizdejki, 1923), and The Shoemakers (Szewcy, 1934). Witkiewicz’s The Water Hen opens with a tableau representative of the playwright-cum-painter’s intensely visual imagination. In an open field by the sea, a man in eighteenth century garb aims a shotgun at a woman in a chemise. She stands on a mound of earth, bound to a crimson pole from which hangs an octagonal lantern of green glass. Behind this strange couple, the red setting sun

Surrealism illuminates a sky filled with fantastically shaped clouds. When the man eventually fires his shotgun at the woman, she calmly observes ‘‘One miss. The other straight through the heart,’’ and continues to converse with her killer for some time before she expires. Just as Louis Aragon developed The Mirror-Wardrobe One Fine Evening, Witkiewicz builds The Water Hen out of cliche´s—in this case the fatal sex war between husband and wife a´ la Strindberg—but he reinvigorates it through elements of parody, dream, anachronism, and vivid stage imagery. Witkiewicz believed in the primacy of ‘‘Pure Form’’ in drama. Although drama could never achieve the total abstract form of music or painting, he argued that it was formal elements, not mimetic subject matter, which endow a play with power and a claim to permanence. The mixture of human actions with strongly formal elements, such as the striking stage picture that opens The Water Hen, aims to convey the mystery of human existence and elicits metaphysical feelings in the spectator. Pure Form, as the bearer of metaphysical feelings, is the sole weapon to combat the increasing soullessness of modernity. For Witkiewicz, the modern world is entropic. People are becoming more and more incapable of experiencing the mystery of existence; the interest in and capacity for aesthetic feeling and philosophic thought are steadily diminishing. Instead we turn to narcotics, fads, and the increasingly strident stimulation of the movies. Dwarfed by comparison to figures of the past, we are condemned to be wannabes. The repertoire of past cultural types—whether the romantic artist, the femme fatale, the tyrant, or the Nietzschean superman—have all become hopelessly passe´ and can only be relived as parodies. At the same time, no new roles present themselves. Witkiewicz’s protagonists are often victims of a hypertrophied consciousness which impels them to make ever more extreme choices in the vain pursuit of meaning; choices that only lead them to become increasingly bizarre self-parodies. Witkiewicz’s Janulka, Daughter of Fidezko takes a popular piece of nineteenth century Polish historical fiction as its jumping-off point, but collages its fourteenth century setting with references to Picasso, Scho¨nberg, Einstein, and contemporary philosophy. The King of Lithuania’s throne room is outfitted with a stylish cafe´ serviced by minor nobility (‘‘People of a certain psychological makeup can’t live without cafe´s,’’ the monarch observes). Intrigue, coups, and mass bloodshed lead not to the excitement of a romantic potboiler, but to mounting disillusionment and ennui, as the characters realize that they are thin retreads of historical heroes and heroines of bygone days. The Master of the Teutonic Knights finally removes his armor and walks about in violet pajamas with a matching nightcap. The Princess Janulka wearies of her powerful and ambitious suitors and yearns for an ordinary man. When, in a parody of fairy tale romance, a grotesquely birdlike monster is transformed into the man of Janulka’s dreams, he is nothing more than a suave ‘‘monster-about-town’’ in a gray suit and spats, who reminds his

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Western Drama through the Ages inamorata that their romance is inevitably banal: ‘‘we know—and so does everybody else—what love is like from all those realistic plays—in French, German, Dutch, Polish, and even Lithuanian and Romanian. . .’’ But the lapse into banality does not ensure security, as we see when all the major characters are butchered by a band of Boyars in the final moments of the play, and a new king and queen prepare to ascend the throne. For Witkiewicz, the greatest barbarity exists comfortably alongside the highest achievements of modernity.

Dramatic Surrealism in Belgium In Belgium, Michel de Ghelderode (1898–1962) relished the excesses, savageries, and strange beauties of the medieval, Renaissance and baroque periods. Like Witkiewicz, Ghelderode aimed to create a sense of mystery in his spectators, and turned away from what he took to be the sadly demystified modern world. He was inspired by biblical tales, medieval legends, the grotesque images of painters Hieronymus Bosch and James Ensor, the circus, the music hall, and above all, the puppet theater. A work of dark eroticism, Lord Halewyn (Sire Halewijn, 1934) draws on a Flemish folk song, and tells of a serial killer who more than meets his match in the beautiful princess who decapitates him, displays his head triumphantly in her father’s court, and dies. His most notorious work, Chronicles of Hell (Fastes d’enfer, 1929) is set in a decaying episcopal palace with tapestries hanging in shreds and the edges of the chamber heaped with ‘‘baroque objects, idols, suns, witches’ masks, multicolored devils, totems, stakes, and instruments of torture.’’ The bishop, Jan in Eremo, reputedly the offspring of a mermaid and a monk, stalks the palace in a demonic state between life and death, unable to dislodge the poisoned consecrated host that was given him on his sickbed by a rival cleric. Other plays of Ghelderode display a bawdy sense of humor or a wistful, melancholy charm. Christopher Columbus (Christophe Colomb, 1927) is one of the latter. Its title character is an implacable dreamer, delighted with spheres, who is first seen admiring the roundness of the soap bubbles he blows. In his voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, he encounters a siren and his own guardian angel, and finally meets Montezuma, with whom he dances joyfully on ship deck.

U.S. Dramatic Realism Between the World Wars In the United States, nonrealistic playwrights between the World Wars tended to be more influenced by expressionism than surrealism. One of the few exceptions was E.E. Cummings’s (1894–1962) Him, an ambitious, sprawling play about a playwright writing a play about a playwright writing a play that remains one of the most admired American surrealist experiments. Though vastly more prolific in his dramatic output than Cummings, William Saroyan (1908–81) is nevertheless similarly remembered for only one of his

Surrealism plays—The Time of Your Life (1939), a gently affectionate study of drifters in a saloon. Most of his other plays enjoyed only brief professional runs or amateur productions, and some remain unperformed. First gaining attention in the commercial theater for gentle dramas of poetic realism, Saroyan developed his own distinct variety of surrealism from the 1940s onward. Without either the irony or sexual menace that often characterize the works of his European counterparts, these whimsical, sometimes sentimental, celebrations of the Common Man and childlike innocence tap a vein of feeling that is distinctly American. When asked to explain one of his plays, Saroyan answered, ‘‘The theme of the play is quite simple. It’s contemptuous of the phony, that’s all.’’ Saroyan’s dramaturgy is distinguished by its disdain for conventional structure and a preference for open-ended, improvisational forms—an approach that has led him to be seen as a precursor of the beatniks and hippies. While Love’s Old Sweet Song (1940) was in rehearsal, Saroyan was more than willing to write new scenes for any eccentric actors who came to him with ideas. He considered including a woman who wanted to parachute onto the stage, but was dissuaded when he realized the stunt could prove lethal. Sam, The Highest Jumper of Them All (1960) developed out of improvisations by the cast during rehearsals. Sweeney in the Trees (1939) presents a series of scenes loosely arranged around the conflict between creativity and materialism, while a tree grows mysteriously within the apartment building that serves as the setting. Jim Dandy, Fat Man in a Famine (1941) is structured between expressions of joy and despair, set in a transparent eggshell that contains the world in miniature—complete with ruins, a public library, a jail, a circus wagon, and other locales. All of these plays preach the need to embrace life in all its glorious variety and eccentricity, and to love each other. Though largely forgotten, Saroyan’s plays remain the most significant body of American surrealist drama to appear before the 1960s, and may well merit reassessment.

Links with Absurdism In the 1950s and 1960s, playwrights were less influenced by surrealism than by absurdism, with its cooler, more alienated tone and existentialist musings. But the line between the two movements is far from clear-cut. Although Arthur Adamov (1908–70) has been identified with the theater of the absurd, he edited a surrealist journal, and his early plays create a nightmarish atmosphere of dread. Professor Taranne (Le Professeur Taranne, 1953), a one-act play about a professor accused of a series of offenses including indecent exposure, was based on an actual dream of the playwright’s. Euge`ne Ionesco (1909–94) displayed a fondness for nonsense and oneiric images that often makes him appear closer to his predecessors Cocteau and Vitrac than his absurdist contemporaries Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet. In Ame´de´e or How to Get Rid of It (Ame´de´e ou Comment s’en de´barraser,

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Western Drama through the Ages 1954), the dead love between a married couple is embodied in a corpse that grows larger and larger, filling their apartment. The continual flux between life and death and dream and waking life in Journeys Among the Dead (Voyages chez les morts, 1982) suggests a strong affinity to Strindberg’s A Dream Play. In Poland, Slawomir Mrozek’s Tango (Tango, 1964) and Tadeusz Rozewicz’s White Marriage (Biale Malzenstwo, 1979) are only two of many plays that show the influence of Witkiewicz’s experiments in the 1920s and 1930s.

British Surrealistic Drama Although the French surrealists admitted an affinity with those British masters of nonsense Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, surrealism has had little influence on the British stage until recently. While absurdism influenced the work of Harold Pinter and N.F. Simpson in the late 1950s, the surrealists were ignored. Tom Stoppard (b. 1937) was inspired by the paintings of Rene´ Magritte in his one-act, After Magritte (1970) and frolicked about with the origins of Dada in Travesties (1974) with an impishness far closer in spirit to Cocteau’s surrealism than Dada’s indignation. Caryl Churchill (b. 1938) has made some forays into surrealist territory, most notably with her reworking of fairy tale motifs in The Skriker, a sinister tale of a shapeshifter in modern London. But no British playwright has been as consistently surrealist as the brilliant and sadly underrated Snoo Wilson (b. 1948), who has often been dismissed with faint praise as a ‘‘cult author.’’ Wilson’s dramatic universe is vast and protean, mixing history, myth, occult lore, dream, and science fiction in a single work. Moonshine (1999) begins with a bizarre fact: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed that fairies had actually been sighted and photographed in the English countryside. Wilson sets Doyle out on a trip to photograph the fairies, only to encounter Abraxas, the Lord of Heaven, who is trying to save the earth from collision with a meteorite propelled by his malevolent son Moloch (propagated by his father in an unfortunate moment of cosmic masturbation). Moloch is not only the Prince of Darkness, but a malign media tycoon who assumed human form in Australia, bearing a disconcerting and delightful affinity to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Unlike Murdoch, however, he also is the father of twin daughters with a growing appetite for human flesh who are ‘‘clad in extravagantly bad-taste trailer-trash rag-doll punk.’’ Needless to say, it is up to Doyle to save planet Earth—and he does. For Wilson, the everyday world depicted in realist dramas is actually propelled by irrational forces that often manifest themselves nakedly in his plays through the unanticipated arrival of figures of mythic proportions. In Moonshine it is Abraxas and Moloch. In Darwin’s Flood (1994), Charles Darwin is visited on the eve of his death by Friedrich Nietzsche and Jesus. The play allows the three to debate philosophical points, but they also manifest incredible energy in less intellectual

Surrealism pursuits. Nietzsche, degenerating into the last stages of syphilis and reduced to travelling in a wheelbarrow pushed by his sister Elizabeth, is determined to be castrated by a male prostitute, but has to settle for the less fierce attentions of Mary Magdalene, who appears as a somewhat blase´ professional dominatrix. Jesus, who appears in the form of an Northern Irish long-distance bicyclist, spends much of his visit up in the bedroom with Darwin’s devoutly Christian wife, Emma, but proves sadly incapable of committing to a long-term relationship. These eruptions of primal energy, however, are not only manifested in the characters but in moments of stage spectacle: Darwin’s father’s face appears in the ceiling of his library, eventually crashing to the floor and leaving a hole in the ceiling, allowing Mary Magdalene to make her first entrance lowered down by a helicopter; the ark, portending another deluge, pushes its way up to the surface from beneath Darwin’s back lawn. In Wilson’s intellectually dense, visually extravagant, and comically inventive work, the energies of magic, sexuality, and artistic creativity repeatedly succeed in escaping from the straitjackets society tailors. But while surrealist experimentation in England has been relatively scant, the contemporary American theater currently boasts a number of notable playwrights who continue to manifest surrealist impulses in their work. Indeed, there are more playwrights in Manhattan today who can confidently be labeled ‘‘surrealist’’ than could be found in 1930s Paris. ‘‘Nothing is as beautiful as a mystery’’ remarks Robert Wilson (b. 1941)—a comment that reveals his surrealist proclivities. His position as a successor to the French surrealists was confirmed in 1971, when his eight-and-a-half hour Deafman Glance was performed in Paris. After seeing it, Louis Aragon, one of the few surviving first-generation surrealists, enthused, ‘‘Bob Wilson is not a surrealist. He is what we, with whom surrealism was born, dreamed would come after us and go beyond us.’’ A highly visual artist, many of Wilson’s most important works have been storyboarded rather than written, and the most arresting moments of his productions have usually been visual. In The King of Spain (1969), monstrous feline paws, reaching from floor to ceiling, crossed the stage. In his staging of Euripides’ Alcestis (1986) cypress trees were slowly transformed—first into Corinthian columns, then into smokestacks. Wilson’s use of tableaux and slow, sometimes almost imperceptible movements evoke a dreamlike state. Like Lautre´amont, he reveals qualities through the juxtaposition of disparate objects. As he has explained, the placement of a baroque candlestick on a baroque table reveals nothing about either, while the placement of the same candlestick on a rock will begin to reveal the properties of both. So, for example, in The Golden Windows (1982), an unidentified man hung by his neck against a night sky, as someone breezily whistled ‘‘A Bicycle Built For Two.’’ The hanging was completely decontextualized, all the more disturbing for remaining unexplained.

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Recent American Surrealistic Drama Two of the earliest of these new American surrealists remain the most admired and influential. Adrienne Kennedy (b. 1931) has brought a sharp awareness of problems of race and gender to surrealism. The Funnyhouse of a Negro (1960) ends with its African American protagonist, Sarah, committing suicide, haunted and drawn to figures of whiteness, such as the plaster statue of Queen Victoria that sits on the stage. A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976) gives a more hopeful version of a similar struggle, as the heroine deals with the images of white Hollywood—taken from Now Voyager, A Place in the Sun, and Viva Zapata—by learning to write her own plays. Sam Shepard (b. 1943) created a distinctly American surrealist landscape of gangsters, hipsters, and rock ‘n rollers in his early works. In Mad Dog Blues (1971), for example, a rock star and his sidekick encounter Paul Bunyan, Captain Kidd, and a whip-wielding Marlene Dietrich in their wanderings. Although both Shepard and Kennedy have tended increasingly toward realism in their later work, the surrealist influence remains evident. Suzan-Lori Parks (b. 1954) has created haunted dreamscapes of the African American experience of racism and violence in The America Play and The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole World (both 1990). In his whimsical humor and gentle affection for idiosyncratic drifters, Len Jenkin (b. 1941) can be seen as the successor to William Saroyan. Jenkin’s landscape, seen in such plays as Dark Ride (1981), American Notes (1988), and Like I Say (1998) is a sprawling nocturnal expanse of freeways, strip malls, and rundown motels, largely peopled by insomniac drifters whose tales are dreamlike pastiches of weird themes from comic books, pulp fiction, tabloid journalism, and B movies. Mac Wellman (b. 1945) has satirized the hypocrisy and anti-intellectualism of American conservatism in Sincerity Forever (1990) and Seven Blowjobs (1991), and has brought space aliens into suburban and small-town America with Cleveland (1986) and Whirligig (1989). A theatrical poet with an ear for the vernacular, Wellman spins out long arias that expose the panic, anger, and loneliness that characterize much of contemporary American life: ‘‘Now we all, each and every one, are orphans’’ concludes Mr. William Hard in The Hyacinth Macaw (1994). Wellman’s essay, ‘‘A Chrestomathy of Twenty-Two Answers to TwentyTwo Wholly Unaskable and Unrelated Questions Concerning Political and Poetic Theater’’ (1993) argues with great humor and insight against the hidebound, neo-Aristotelian ‘‘Geezer Theater’’ of the theatrical establishment in America, and celebrates a ‘‘Poetic Theater’’ that is bold enough to bend time, court chaos, and avoid tedious sermonizing. David Greenspan (b. 1956) has brought a gay sensibility to American surrealism. Son of a Pioneer (1994) and Dead Mother, or Shirley Not All in Vain (1990)

Surrealism revisit the loneliness and frustration of middle-class domesticity from a gay perspective. The former begins with outside a ‘‘nice suburban home’’ and ends on the wastes of Mars, where the father in the form of a bear forces his son to have oral sex with him. The latter shows a gay son’s disturbing ability to channel his deceased, emotionally disturbed and homophobic mother, and sends him to visit her in the underworld, where she sits watching an episode of Hollywood Squares. In The Myopia: An Epic Burlesque of Tragic Proportion (2003), a domestic drama with fairy tale motifs unfolds within a historical satire. A bravura one-man show performed by its author, The Myopia shows a young writer who is trying both to write a play about his parent’s miserable marriage and finish his father’s uncompleted musical on the life of President Warren G. Harding, with a character reminiscent of musical comedy star Carol Channing serving as play doctor. Like Cummings’s Him, The Myopia confounds multiple levels of reality and a rich range of genres as it dramatizes the drama of a playwright searching for his drama. No current theatrical artist more clearly exemplifies the ongoing persistence and creative vitality of the surrealist tradition than playwright, director, designer, and theoretician Richard Foreman (b. 1937), founder and artistic director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre. Like his surrealist predecessors, Foreman has written about his productions as dreams: ‘‘I try to make plays as hard to remember as a vivid dream which, when awake, you know you have lived with intensity, yet try as you might you can’t remember.’’ Working to burst the theatrical straitjackets commonly employed to give every moment in a production a clear and unambiguous meaning—plot, character, theme, and atmosphere—Foreman works on every aspect of a production to open it up to a range of competing, even chaotic impulses. A person who has admitted being annoyed whenever anyone asks him the question ‘‘How are you?’’ because it seems to him unanswerable, Foreman has created a theater that cuts through our habitual responses to uncover the rich anarchy that seethes beneath our most confident formulations. As a dramatist, he has sometimes revived the practice of automatic writing, putting himself in a state between sleep and waking, and allowing the words to flow from that state. Rather than follow a prepared scenario, he produces notebooks filled with material in the form of prose poems and then assembles them into dramatic texts that develop through strategies of association, disjunction, and, most importantly, contradiction. At the beginning of Paradise Hotel (1999), a voice tells us that this title is only a facade for another play, Hotel Fuck, which in turn fronts yet another play, Hotel Beautiful Roses. Idealization and raunchy physicality coexist and in the course of the performance become increasingly indistinguishable from each other. It is not a matter of a pretty illusion masking a sordid reality. Rather, oppositions in Foreman inevitably elicit and contain each other.

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Western Drama through the Ages In production, Foreman works to further complicate our responses. A character might say, ‘‘How beautiful this is!’’ but snarl the line with disgust and an aggressive gesture, or back away from the ‘‘beautiful’’ object in horror. Objects themselves often manifest ambivalence; for The Cure (1986), Foreman designed upholstered furniture that suggested at once tables and sofas. A seemingly straightforward object may be used in such a way that it comes to evoke unfamiliar associations through its use; a lamp may be used as a weapon, a piece of food, or a sexual organ. The sets are similarly multivalent: the setting for Film is Evil: Radio is Good (1987) suggested at once a radio studio, a classroom, and a hotel lobby. Following the surrealist tradition, Foreman has relied on elements of chance to shape his productions. In the early years of the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, actors were told to wear whatever they wore to the first rehearsal for the run of the show. A red shirt or a faded pair of blue jeans thus became a ‘‘found object’’ that was incorporated into the visual composition of the production. When a favorite actress said she wanted more lines in a scene, Foreman took the script and transferred some lines written for another character to her. In one of his essays, Foreman describes what might be the utopian vision behind all surrealist theater: ‘‘I can imagine every member of the audience falling asleep and the play continuing to the end, turning into an objectification of the dream of that audience.’’ Through the imaginations of Richard Foreman, Snoo Wilson, David Greenspan, and many others, umbrellas, sewing machines, and as-yet unnamed objects continue to encounter each other on the dissection tables of the theater.

FURTHER READING Benedikt, Michael and George E. Wellwarth, eds. and trans. Modern French Theatre: An Anthology of Plays. The Avant-Garde, Dada, and Surrealism. New York: Dutton, 1966. Foreman, Richard. Unbalancing Acts: Foundations for a Theater. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992. Witkiewicz, S. I. The Witkiewicz Reader. Translated and Edited by Daniel Gerould. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1992.


Tragedy Kimball King

Not surprisingly, more audiences are interested in dramatic comedy than in dramatic tragedy. Yet tragic drama is seldom depressing. Beginning in ancient Greece it affirmed the nobility and high stature of characters at the same time that it revealed their doom. Sophocles’s King Oedipus is a ‘‘tragic’’ figure but he is also larger than life, creative, inquiring and estimable in many ways. One can say that Oedipus had a quick temper and that he should have remained home with his foster parents and never married; but it is ultimately revealed that he accidentally kills his own father, whom he had never seen before (as the result of an argument over right-of-way on the road to Delphi), marries his mother, and sires incestuous children. Although his wife/mother commits suicide and he blinds himself for his misdeeds, it is impossible to see him as a completely ‘‘bad’’ person. In Oedipus The King the will of the Gods must prevail over man’s will and the prophesies of the Gods will come true. Antigone, as the daughter of Oedipus, is also doomed from birth. However, in the play Antigone she sacrifices her own life in order to bury her brother properly. Finally in the third play, Oedipus at Colonnus, in what is often considered Sophocles’s tragic trilogy, the former king is forgiven by the gods and finds a measure of peace. Centuries later Arthur Miller would say that Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is a ‘‘tragic’’ character. In the middle of the twentieth century as the unhappiness of ordinary men seemed to increase, Willy’s eventual suicide indicates the failure of a society to provide attainable goals for the average person. Willy Loman then becomes symbolic, representing all ‘‘low-men’’ who have been deceived into believing that good looks, affability, and athletic talent guarantee wealth and happiness. Everyday protagonists can be seen therefore to have tragic lives, not

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Western Drama through the Ages because their own lives influence others, but because a deeply flawed world has marked them for disappointment. Ironically, a world which presently provides more opportunities for self-realization seems to have produced a passive rather than an active tragic hero or heroine. Many argue that the true era of tragedy developed in Greece in the fifth century B . C . Foremost among the philosophers who describe tragedy was Aristotle. S.H. Butcher translated Aristotle as saying: ‘‘Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear affecting the proper catharsis or purgation of these emotions.’’ We must ask ourselves if only pity and fear will be removed when we experience ‘‘catharsis’’ in a tragedy, or if other emotions, possibly destructive, will also be purged. It seems that Greek tragedy suggests that humankind is flawed and will always fail, sometimes quite excruciatingly, to achieve perfection. Coming to terms with imperfection, learning to compromise, learning to accept a humble position in the order of things is one way to avoid becoming a tragic victim. Yet there is a grandeur in the protagonist who refuses to be conventional or ordinary. The ancient Greek Oedipus with his desire to rule with complete authority and wisdom, Macbeth in England’s Renaissance wanting to be ‘‘number one’’ in his kingdom, both suffer and are destroyed. Interestingly, there are always men and women who are ‘‘risk-takers,’’ who are willing to face disaster if there is a chance of obtaining grandeur or power. Comic characters share many traits with tragic ones. For example, hubris (arrogance or ego-inflation) could describe not only Sophocles’s Oedipus but also Shakespeare’s Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Malvolio is basically a comic character, a buffoon in the author’s eyes. Ultimately Aristotle concentrated on the pity and fear one felt when viewing a tragic play and the sort of relief that is experienced when a protagonist is struck down and man’s diminished role, as decided by the Greek gods, is established. The Roman Seneca also depicted a tragic universe. But his tragedies often concentrated on gruesome behavioral tales—such as forms of cannibalism or vengeance. In the English Renaissance nearly any violent or alarming detail in a play was called ‘‘Senecan.’’ Gotthold Lessing in the eighteenth century mainly continued Aristotle’s views of tragedy. He wrote comedies like Minna Von Barnhelm but he also believed that the purpose of both comedy and tragedy was moral improvement. The purpose of tragedy, he wrote, was to educate audiences to higher levels of character, to experience compassion and pity for those who had overreached themselves. Fear is a major element in tragedy and possibly an audience derives a secret pleasure from knowing that, because most people avoid risky behavior, they are unlikely to

Tragedy experience catastrophe. Perversely, great tragedies, such as Agamemnon, Thyestes, Hamlet, and others tend to restore order to the world and to make audiences feel comfortable with their own mediocrity. However, tragic-comedies or so called ‘‘dark’’ comedies may be more troubling. Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot waiting endlessly for a Mr. Godot, who will probably never appear, are more troublesome than a murderer like Shakespeare’s Richard III who will die in battle and become ‘‘the Scourge of God,’’ removing evil from the earth and ‘‘cleansing’’ the British monarchy by his own departure. People are made uncomfortable by the ambiguities of the theater of the absurd, by the suggestion that humans have learned nothing in their long history and that life is senseless and redemption is unattainable. What could be more ‘‘tragic’’ than the conclusion of Beckett’s Endgame, where Clov claims he will leave Hamm forever, but he remains in a claustrophobic room because life on the ‘‘outside’’ is physically and emotionally impossible. Tragedy is consoling in a world that believes in hierarchy and divine justice. In a relativistic universe tragedy and comedy blend into an unbearable uneasiness, a permanent sense of insecurity.

FURTHER READING Campbell, Lewis. Tragic Drama in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Shakespeare: An Essay. London: John Murray, 1904. Leaska, Mitchell A. The Voice of Tragedy. New York: Robert Spillor and Sons, 1963. Wadeck, Peter B. Weighing Delight and Dole. Peter Lang: New York, Frankfurt, 1988.

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PART VI

Theatrical Essentials


Acting Styles Julie Fishell

Versatility is the goal of many actors. Inhabiting characters from a wide range of dramatic texts provides a relished opportunity to explore social, historical, political, and personal worlds far different from their own. Most often, it is the stage actor who invests in negotiating a range of plays that feature heightened texts, disparate styles, and content. Many actors commit to advanced or conservatorybased training in order to successfully negotiate plays of style—plays that are of a particular form or typify a distinct period. The contemporary actor when faced with the task of acting in plays of style is wise to recognize the relevance of human experience, cultivate a sensitivity to language, research facts about the text and its time, develop a flexible body and voice, and trust in the vital participation of imagination. Most contemporary actors are comfortable with realistic texts and modern acting theory. Early theories crafted by Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863–1938) continue to permeate actor training in our universities, conservatories, and professional studios. Stanislavsky believed a truly fine performance was primarily achieved by an actor’s ability to relax, relate, and seek clear objectives or goals. Stanislavsky succinctly stated that the actor can easily define her job as playing truthful actions to overcome obstacles and to achieve objectives by personalizing the given circumstances. However, the actor experienced and confident in applying these foundational theories when performing realistic texts such as Henrik Ibsen, Tennessee Williams, Beth Henley, and Marsha Norman may not so easily translate their skills to a heightened or stylized text such as Shakespeare, Molie`re, Pinter, Beckett, Brecht, Feydeu, or Fornes.

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Western Drama through the Ages In the mid-twentieth century actor, director, theorist, and educator Michel Saint Denis founded drama schools in England, Canada, and the United States. Saint Denis crafted courses of study that directly addressed the contemporary actor’s insufficient ability to live their roles when working on a heightened text. His theories and their practical application continue to influence the curriculum of all major conservatory and professional actor training programs around the globe. For more information on Saint Denis’s career see his books Theatre, a Rediscovery of Style and Training for the Theatre: Premises and promises.

BEGINNING TO ACT The layperson, student actor, or amateur actor will most likely, misguidedly, start with externals. For some unknown reason, it is not uncommon for an actor to alter posture, usually sitting ramrod straight, turning out a foot, or embroider or overstate behavior and activities when rehearsing. Affectation or pretence often permeate the work and result in added tension and rigidity to the physical and vocal life of the actor in role. One can only speculate that this phenomenon could be the result of seeing performances of plays or films set in specific periods that leave their mark as stiff, methodical, and emotionless productions. Equally possible is that actors who lack vocal and physical training may overcompensate in these areas because of their inexperience with heightened or stylized texts. An actor who is comfortable with contemporary or more realistic texts may unnecessarily discount the value of applying some of Stanislavsky’s basic theories to their work. It order to avoid this trap, actors must identify with their character as an individual with a human qualities and needs within the play. Just as Stanislavsky advised, one must create a relationship to action and circumstance by applying the supposition of ‘‘What if ?’’ or the ‘‘Magic If’’ to the work. The contemporary actor may actually be surprised that any role in a play of style unquestionably benefits from recognizing and cultivating specific human urges, whims, wishes, fancies, specific pasts, needs, and inclinations. This assumption will then allow the actor to accept that characters are visceral and contemporary to the world they inhabit. This assumption is essential and without full belief in it actors often fail to contribute richly to a stylized text.

Specific Skills Sensitivity to Language When studying any script, the actor must chart each playwright’s landscape of images that outline given circumstances including the plot or chain of events, character behavior and logic, actions and themes. An added task when working

Acting Styles on stylized texts may be reading the play in several translations. Some original scripts have also been adapted for the stage and reading the original in variation may prove to kindle recognition of the play’s essential components. Ultimately, the contemporary actor may need to utilize the resources of a fine library, consult a production dramaturg or contact a local authority in order to grasp the text • Word choice and substitution: In playwright George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, character Eliza Doolittle bestows friendship, trust, and gratitude along with distance and rejection using only the words of her name. She addresses the benevolent character of Colonel Pickering, ‘‘Do you know what began my real education? Your calling me Miss Doolittle that day when I first came to Wimpole Street. . .I should like you to call me Eliza now, if you would. And I should like Professor Higgins to call me Miss Doolittle.’’ An inexperienced actor may only read these lines as a simple request on the part of Shaw’s heroine without slowing down to honor the complexity and depth of Eliza’s action. So word choice often provides significant clues to character and motivation. • Images: Kristin Linklater, respected voice teacher, actor, and director, says that ‘‘Becoming aware of images in language is a process of slowing down.’’ An actor must take time with individual words, recognizing the organization of words or the syntax of the writing. An actor must completely concretize and clarify the meaning of tangible and intangible things. Plays of style as well as contemporary plays benefit from the actor’s taking time to clarify, specify, and concretize the ideas in the play. For example, the word home will provoke personal meaning and present a particular image to an individual actor. So when the idea or image of home is referred to within the life of a play, the actor must redefine and clarify meaning specific to character. • Avoiding pauses: Another trap for the actor most comfortable acting realism is adding unnecessary pauses to heightened or period texts. Often playwrights have structured their scripts with a special kind of symmetry. The plays of Molie`re, for example, have most successfully been translated in rhyme by playwright Richard Wilbur. Within this rhyme scheme there is a balance and proportion that urges the actor to create life on the words. There is a precision common to heightened texts of varying periods that rely on the text to flow. What a contemporary actor might consider subtext is actually provided in words. And if images are broken up too much, the character’s logic completely falls apart. Take for example, the first few lines of Jacques’ famous speech from Shakespeare’s As You Like It: All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. A little fact-finding will help see two sentences on the page. Therefore, actors need to fight the tendency to stop their thought and speech where each comma falls. If they do this, they will start to clarify how succinctly Jacques develops the metaphor of theater for life

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Western Drama through the Ages in the first four lines of the speech. There is no need to stop the line to create a sense of invention. Jacques is creating or riffing on his idea out loud. From ‘‘stage’’ he discovers ‘‘players’’ then ‘‘exits’’—’’entrances’’—’’plays’’—’’parts’’ to ‘‘acts.’’ The contemporary actor when performing this speech would do well to avoid ‘‘taking a minute’’—a famous phrase used as teaching tactic by Lee Strasberg (1901–82), considered by some to be the patriarch of American ‘‘method’’ acting. When performing heightened text from a distinctive period, an actor who imposes breaks or pauses to simulate sincerity, invention, or ‘‘reality’’ often achieves the opposite. • Resources: Most popular and reliable are the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and Encyclopedia Britannica. When working on Shakespeare, in particular, it is common to spend time with Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionaries, Volume I and II and A Shakespeare Glossary: Enlarged and Revised by C. T. Onions. Try also Leslie O’Dell’s Shakespearean Scholarship: A Guide for Actors and Students and Webster’s New Explorer Dictionary and Thesaurus. These dictionaries define common and uncommon words used by Shakespeare and inventory their use by comedy, tragedy, history, or poem. Pronunciation is also an issue for the actor. Key pronunciation dictionaries include English Pronunciation Dictionary by Daniel Jones.

Cultural Curiosity In order to link oneself to the play in cultural context the actor may find great value in researching key historical, political, literary, philosophical, artistic, religious, scientific, and pedestrian events specific to the play at hand and the playwright’s life span. A great resource is Bernard Grun’s book The Timetables of History based on Werner Stein’s ‘‘Kulturfahrplan.’’ This book covers world events of note from 4500 B.C. to the 1990s. For example, recognizing that dramatist and writer Anton Chekhov’s famous Russian drama The Seagull was performed for the first time two years after the last Emperor of Russia, Tsar Nicholas II, took the throne and two years before photos were taken with artificial light. Suddenly these cultural guideposts can assist our imaginations and align our thinking with the world in which Chekhov lived and wrote. Vocal And Physical Ease And Flexibility The actor who understands the meaning and motivation of a character must have the physical and vocal ability to convey it. Regardless of the style or genre of the play, without the cooperation and integration of a relaxed body and voice, a character will never fully come to life. As mentioned earlier, it is common for actors to almost subconsciously change their physical carriage, use of gestures, and breathing patterns when working on a heightened text or play from a distinct period. However, the same actor reading a scene from Moises Kaufman’s The Laramie Project (2000), or even Susan Glaspell’s Trifles written in 1916, will most likely physically and vocally contribute with ease and integration.

Acting Styles • Developing a neutral physicality is crucial for the actor who desires to tackle a variety of roles in a range of genres. Actors must seek to create a body that is flexible, energized and without habit. The body without habit is centered, easy, and integrated with the emotions and the mind. Actors often train in The Alexander Technique, the Feldenkrais method, and other similar disciplines to release unnecessary tension and maximize coordination and balance. An actor is truly free to create when the slight limp, rounded shoulders, or habitual curl of the lip are adopted as choices for a character and not present as the result of the actor’s habit. When cast as Orgon in Molie`re’s Tartuffe, the physically relaxed actor can arrive at the costume fitting and wear the clothes of period without the clothes wearing him or her. The corset, long skirt, a fan, monocle, spats, reticule, cravat, or scabbard insinuates movement to the body of the relaxed actor and provokes an altered physicality. There is never a need in the first place to ‘‘adopt’’ or ‘‘put on’’ a false walk or affected placement of the neck. Certainly there are manners and codes of conduct that a director may ask the actor to adopt but for the most part a body sensitive to weights, textures, and silhouette will believably assume life inside stylized costumes. Finally, mask work, as theorized by master teacher Jacque LeCoque, contributes greatly to an actor’s expansion of physical skill as does clowning, and physical techniques directly related to acting. • Developing a supple voice that is well-placed, resonant, and unfaltering. Not only is it important to create enough sound to carry in a theater, but the actor must work to expand vocal range, recognize centers of resonance and master proper vowel and consonant placement. Fine diction distinguishes a great actor and is the responsibility of any performer regardless the genre but especially heightened texts. As mentioned earlier, heightened texts often give an actor complete and complex thought through language. Some writers need twenty lines in reference to one idea, question, or topic. Often, plays of style are also epic plays and demand that playing spaces be uncluttered and easily adapted. There are many reputable systems of vocal training. Numerous practitioners and instructors including Cicily Berry, Kristin Linklater, Robert Neff Williams, Elizabeth Smith, Patsy Rodenburg, Jeffrey Crockett, and Bonnie Raphael have written texts and have contributed to global voice pedagogy and professional practice. The work of famed speech coach, teacher, and Broadway consultant Edith Skinner is featured in the seminal text Speak With Distinction. This text, complete with optional tape, is devoted to speech and phonetics with explicit information pertaining to a range of topics including the International Phonetic Alphabet, syllabication, diagrams, and exercises. Additionally, a handy web site for dialects is http://web.ku.edu/idea/.

Imagination: The Most Valuable Asset an Actor Brings Imagination must be the actors’ constant companion when working on any role regardless the text. However, a stage actor fulfilling heightened texts commonly structured in Epic form is often stretched to expand his imagination to concretize multiple locations at breakneck speed. Think of Shakespeare’s As You Like It where the action moves from an orchard, to the lawn of the palace, to a room in the palace, to the Forest of Arden, back to the palace within the first five scenes. Or consider the daunting task of the classic role of Messenger that must report

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Western Drama through the Ages and thereby actualize emotionally charged, graphic and crucial events in numerous Greek texts. The contemporary actor who relies on a fully realized stage or film set, complete with a plethora of props that provide her with primary or secondary activities, is often lost in a world that features heightened texts and multiple locations. So, the actor must take time to specify locations using the five senses that often prove the road to imaginative play. It may be the smell of a remembered spring day that proves the actor’s key to believing the Forest of Arden is three dimensional. It may be the remembered texture of hot, loose sand that is the actor’s key to believing they travelled a specific road toward a Greek temple.

FURTHER READING Grun, Bernard. The Timetables of History. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006. Jones, Daniel. English Pronunciation Dictionary. Cambridge, England, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Saint Denis, Michel. Theatre, a Rediscovery of Style. London: Henemann, 1960. ———. Training for the Theatre: Premises and Promises. London: Heinemann, 1982. Skinner, Edith. Speak With Distinction. New York: Applause Theatre Book Publishers, 1990.


Costume Design in the United States Bobbi Owen

Costume designers are important members of the team of theatrical designers who provide visual spectacle to theatrical productions. They are responsible for all the garments and accessories worn by performers and generally create designs for hair and makeup as well, although design specializations in those areas are emerging. In the United States, costume designers are recognized as integral to successful productions; the European tradition of scenography makes it less common for an individual to specialize in costume design outside North America. Costume designers come from a variety of backgrounds. Some initially studied to be scenic designers, performers, costume construction specialists, or as artists in complementary fields such as sculpture, painting, and fiber arts. Others began their careers as fashion designers or employees at costume rental houses. More often, however, they are costume design specialists trained through an apprenticeship with another designer or in one of the growing number of graduate programs offering a degree in costume design. Frank Poole Bevan (1903–76) at the Yale School of Drama, Paul Reinhardt and Lucy Barton (1891–1971) at the University of Texas, and Barbara and Cletus Anderson at CarnegieMellon are among those individuals instrumental in establishing training programs at universities for designers. The development of the profession, which began toward the end of the nineteenth century, continues through these programs.

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EARLY COSTUME DESIGN IN THE UNITED STATES Prior to the twentieth century, designing original costumes for a new production was unusual. A company of actors who performed a repertory of plays maintained wardrobes and adequately costumed their productions. Established companies amassed large wardrobes and successful costumes were used repeatedly. Because each actor selected his or her own wardrobe, productions rarely possessed visual unity. Some attempt might be made to give period plays a historical look, but this was normally a matter of available garments and conventional taste rather than any overriding concern for consistency. When actors began to work from production to production instead of remaining with one company for several seasons, wardrobes of costumes could no longer be realistically maintained. Instead, company managers selected costumes, often from rental houses with large inventories [such as the establishment run by Maurice Hermann (1866–1921) in New York City and B.J. Simmons Company in London]. These managers were more likely to dress a character according to the needs of the role rather than the personal preference of performers. If time permitted, a company manager could work toward a unified design of sets, furnishings, and costumes in concert with the intent of the play. Occasionally scenic designers would select or approve costumes, or perhaps even design them once the setting was completed. The few individuals who specialized in costumes seldom received recognition. Among those who did were Caroline Siedle (d. 1907), C. Wilhelm (1858–1925), Percy Anderson (1851–1928), and Mrs. John Alexander (1867–1947) who designed for Maude Adams. In some cases, these costume designers were credited on the title pages of playbills, rather than in the back pages along with acknowledgements for piano tuners and stage curtains.

Specialists in Costume Design During the early decades of the twentieth century, as the number of theaters in the United States increased, several developments led to the growing recognition of the contribution that a specialist in the costume area might make to a production. These developments included the increased use of assistants in specialized areas, the 1919 strike by actors for better wages and working conditions, union participation by scenic designers, and the availability of funding through the Federal Theatre Project for individuals working on productions. The movement from a single designer for scenery, costumes, and lights to individual ones for each specialty was gradual. As it became standard practice for a single designer to control all of the visual elements of a production, including scenery, lights, and costumes, assistants began to take responsibility for following the various elements through the construction process. Aline Bernstein (1882–1955), for example, regularly employed

Costume Design in the United States Emeline Clarke Roche (1902–95) as her assistant for scenery and Irene Sharaff (1910–93) as her assistant for costumes. Bernstein began this practice during her association with the Neighborhood Playhouse and at the Civic Repertory Theatre. Over time designers such as Bernstein, Jo Mielziner (1901–76), and Robert Edmond Jones (1997–54) acknowledged the difficulty of maintaining control over this wide range of activities and encouraged their assistants to assume design responsibility. Robert Edmond Jones is widely credited with launching this new American stagecraft when The Man Who Married a Dumb Wife opened on Broadway in 1915. Jo Mielziner, one of the most prolific and creative scene designers of the New York stage in the twentieth century, designed numerous notable premieres of what have become American classics, among them Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Lillian Hellmann’s Watch on the Rhine, and Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie. The mainstream theater community paid attention to what these two influential theater professionals did—and often followed suit. The 1919 Actors’ Equity Association strike for better wages and working conditions also aided the trend toward a specialization in costume design. The star system had long been an important aspect of the theater; performers able to draw large audiences have always had special privileges, including costumes specially designed and constructed by professionals. As a result of the 1919 strike, producers were required to provide costumes, wigs, shoes, and stockings for all women in principal roles and in the chorus. Because producers were required to pay for costumes, they increasingly looked to specialists for decisions about costume selections. In the early 1920s, scenic designers began to join the United Scenic Artists Association. Initially a union for stage painters, the United Scenic Artists Association’s union activities helped stabilize the role of design in production. By 1936 United Scenic Artists had a special section for costume designers, although they did not receive voting rights until 1966. In addition, the Federal Theatre Project influenced the move toward specialization in costume design. Created during the early days of the Depression, the Federal Theatre Project was founded to provide employment for all varieties of theater professionals. Having many different individuals doing specialized jobs meant that more individuals were paid for their work. Once the specializations of costume (and lighting) design were developed, there was little possibility of returning to the old format.

NOTABLE COSTUME DESIGNERS Many talented artists became costume designers as a result of these developments. By the 1930s, Irene Sharaff (1910–93): West Side Story, The King and I,

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Western Drama through the Ages Flower Drum Song; Raoul Pe`ne Du Bois (1914–85): Wonderful Town, No, No, Nanette; Charles LeMaire (1896–1985): George White’s Scandals, Of Thee I Sign; and Lucinda Ballard (1908–93): A Streetcar Named Desire, Annie Get Your Gun; all designed costumes regularly for the thriving Broadway theater. They were joined in the 1940s by designers such as Miles White (1914–2000): Oklahoma!, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Freddy Wittop (1911–2001): Hello, Dolly!, Dear World; and Alvin Colt: Guys and Dolls, A Touch of the Poet; joined the rapidly emerging profession. By the 1940s almost half of the playbills for New York productions credited costume designers, compared with one percent at the turn of the twentieth century. Notable theater artists such as Patton Campbell (Twenty-seven Wagons Full of Cotton), Ann Roth (The Odd Couple, The Tale of the Allergist’s Wife), Theoni V. Adredge (A Chorus Line), and Patricia Zipprodt (1925–99) (Cabaret, Sunday in the Park with George), began designing costumes in the 1950s. They were joined in the 1960s by Florence Klotz (Kiss of the Spider Woman), Willa Kim (Sophisticated Ladies, Will Rogers Follies), and Jane Greenwood (Ballad of a Sad Cafe´), among others. These costume designers continued to work primarily in the theater but, like most contemporary theater artists, also designed opera, dance, film, television, industrial promotions, and extravaganzas. More recently costume designers Gregg Barnes (The Drowsy Chaperone), Gabriel Berry (La MaMa E.T.C.), Judith Dolan (Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), Susan Hilferty (Wicked), Ann Hould-Ward (Beauty and the Beast), Toni-Leslie James (Jelly’s Last Jam) William Ivey Long (The Producers, Hairspray), Martin Pakledinaz (Kiss Me, Kate), Robert Perdziola (The Goodbye Girl), David Zinn (A Tale of Two Cities), and Catherine Zuber (Light on the Piazza), have become familiar names in the New York theater. As American theater has become less centralized, many designers—including Jeanne Button, Deborah Dryden, Susan Mickey, Robert Morgan, Steven Rubin, Paul Tazewell, and Susan Tsu—have gained recognition for the high quality of their costume design in major off-Broadway houses, and in regional theaters such as the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Goodman Theatre, The Guthrie Theatre, and Hartford Stage.

CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS IN COSTUME DESIGN The specialization in costume design has enhanced the need for professionals in costume construction and in the related fields of millinery, wig making, and painting and dyeing. Many regional theaters in the United States as well as colleges and universities maintain their own shops for creating costumes, and costume rental houses such as Western Costume Company, Norcostco, Inc., TDF Costume Collection, and Stagecraft Studios are valuable resources. As the prominence of costume designers has increased, so too has that of professional costume makers. Valentina (1899–1989) made costumes for designers under

Costume Design in the United States contract to major movie studios, dance companies, and Broadway theaters in the middle of the twentieth century, as have Barbara Matera (d. 2001), Martin Izquierdo, and Sally Anne Parsons, among many, many others. Some theatrical designers, including Tony Walton and Santo Loquasto continue the practice of designing both sets and costumes for productions whenever possible. Even these noteworthy designers acknowledge, however, the contributions made by specialists in the area of costume design and the value of having a specialization in the area of costume design. All costume designers acknowledge that their primary purpose is to serve a production by designing appropriate and effective costumes. And yet, all of them can also cite important moments created by costumes, such as the entrance of Dolly Gallagher Levi makes, accompanied by the title song, in Hello, Dolly! The red satin gown with the beaded overdress that Carol Channing wore when she originated the role has been reproduced over and over again because it is impossible to separate Freddy Wittop’s design from the character for whom it was created. The gown is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington DC.

FURTHER READING Anderson, Barbara and Cletus Anderson. Costume Design. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1984. Corey, Irene. The Mask of Reality: An Approach to Design for Theatre. Anchorage, Kentucky: Anchorage Press, 1968. Cunningham, Rebecca. The Magic Garment: Principles of Costume Design. New York: Longman, 1989. Owen, Bobbi. Costume Design on Broadway, Designers and Their Credits: 1915–1985. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1987. Owen, Bobbi. Broadway Design Roster. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2003. Russell, Douglas. Stage Costume Design, Theory, Technique and Style. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1973, 1985. Wilmeth, Don B., ed. Cambridge Guide to American Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

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Directors and Directing Styles Kimball King

Since theater has existed there have always been people who were involved in financing a play, selecting a venue, choosing actors, and favoring a playwright. Often a work was funded by a patron, who no doubt exercised some demands upon the playwright and the actors. Someone like Sophocles may have incorporated the attitudes of contemporary philosophers into his writings and managed to convince his actors to do as he expected. Nevertheless, the concept of a ‘‘director’’ as we know it today, originated within the last century and a half. Most theater historians claim that the first modern ‘‘director’’ was George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen who supervised his own acting troupe, the Meiningen Players, beginning around 1850. The Duke integrated the written play with other aspects of theatrical arts: the costumes, scenery, actors, and venue. About the same time the Duke became a director other ‘‘directors’’ emerged in Europe. This possibly had something to do with a prospering economy and a greater interest in the bourgeois life that it facilitated. Andre´ Antoine founded the The´atre Libre in France. J.T. Grein in England began the Independent Theatre and the famous Konstantin Stanislavsky in Russia began, with the help of Vladimir Nemirovich, the Moscow Arts Theatre. Stanislavsky is particularly important as he insisted that his actors learn the psychological motives of the characters they played. It is difficult to find an actor today who will play an entirely unsympathetic character. Even if an actor portrays a man as evil as Macbeth, he will attempt to ‘‘humanize’’ his character in some way. The ‘‘new’’ Macbeth may be as deplorable as Shakespeare’s in his actions but an audience is more likely to guess at the familial and social dysfunctions that transformed him into a villain.

Directors and Directing Styles

THE DIRECTOR’S RESPONSIBILITIES Directors basically have five responsibilities: they hope to unify the play artistically, to preserve the integrity of the playwright’s vision, to entertain a specific audience, to enlighten it philosophically, and to organize a working process that will result in a satisfying production. Some directors work better than others with actors, leading their actors to perform more effectively. Others are known for their adherence to a playwright’s thematic credo. Still others are conspicuously efficient, providing from the outset clearly achievable goals. Probably a director’s greatest challenge is to ensure accurate play analysis and interpretation. Almost no performances in contemporary theaters lack a director. Occasionally, the playwright himself or herself will direct the play. Or a playwright will direct a work written by a friend or competitor. Toby Cole and Helen Chinoy have assembled an excellent discussion of recent directors. The selections provide a range of theatrical responsibilities appropriate to their era and audiences. In addition to George II, the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen whom they regard as a pioneer of directing, they examine the work of France’s Andre´ Antoine, Germany’s Otto Brahm, Russia’s influential Konstantin Stanislavsky, and America’s David Belasco. Later Cole and Chinoy present articles by Adolphe Appia, Gordon Craig, and George Bernard Shaw. Harley GranvilleBarker, who is also named, actually directed many of Shaw’s plays. GranvilleBarker’s own plays, Waste (1903) and The Voysey Inheritance (1905), were often politically more radical than Shaw’s work and seldom produced during his lifetime. Today they are frequently performed and though modern in feeling seem relatively ‘‘mild.’’ Directors on Directing also lists noted directors Arthur Hopkins, Jacques Copeau, Louis Jouvet, Bertholt Brecht, Tyrone Guthrie, Nicholai Okhlophov, Jean Vitor and Harold Clurman. Among the more famous recent directors are Richard Eyre, Peter Brook, Peter Hall, and Max Stafford-Clark. Of those listed by Cole and Chinoy, Berthold Brecht occasions the most analysis. Brecht claimed he wrote and directed Epic Theatre, in which he revealed that mankind was a sort of epic hero crushed into submission by adverse political forces. A devoted Marxist, Brecht’s plays continually stressed the inadequacies of modern institutions. He also believed in the alienation-effect (or the ‘‘A-effect’’ as it is known in chic circles). An audience is alienated from the conventional suspension of disbelief and forced to face the social issues of Brecht’s plays intellectually. There is no checking in of one’s intelligence at the theater door. Brecht’s plays were banned in Germany during Hitler’s regime and he fled to California, where many of his works were performed at the University of California at Berkeley. After World War II, however, Brecht returned to East Germany where he directed the famous Berliner Ensemble. In Brecht’s plays there are

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Western Drama through the Ages frequent ‘‘expressionistic‘‘ elements—onstage placards, narrators, and other means of ‘‘distancing’’ the audience from dramatic involvement. Sometimes Brecht’s attempts to ‘‘alienate’’ are unsuccessful because audiences often prefer to ‘‘enter into’’ an imaginary work and to accept symbolic representation as reality. Directors today, Nobel Prize Winner Harold Pinter among them, frequently emphasize natural speech, a play’s subtext and psychological ironies that are not immediately apparent. Still, all directors, as the actor/writer Ivor Novello once remarked, ‘‘dislike empty seats.’’

FURTHER READING Berger, Sidney. Playwright versus Director: Authorial Intentions and Performance Interpretations. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1994. Brook, Peter, Gabriella Giannachi, and Mary Luckhurst. On Directing: Interviews with Directors. Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Catron, Louis. The Director’s Vision. Mountain View, California: Mayfield Publishing, 1995. Cole, Toby and Helen Chinoy. Directors on Directing: A Source Book of the Modern Theatre. Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953.


Dramaturgy Karen Blansfield

What exactly is a dramaturg? And what does a dramaturg actually do?

These questions came to me from friends, family, students, and others when I first began working in this capacity. Since then, I have come to find that most dramaturgs—whether in professional, university, or community theaters, full time employees or free-lancers—have pretty much had the same experience. Indeed, these are perhaps the central questions that dog the field of dramaturgy, from both within and without. Professor Lenora Inez Brown of the Theatre School at DePaul University noted that despite the growing number of dramaturgy programs being offered, ‘‘one would think the battles for this often misunderstood field are over, but they are greater today than ever before.’’ (‘‘You Can’t Tell a Dramaturg by Her Title.’’) James Magruder, who was crucial in garnering support from the Mellon Foundation for Baltimore’s Center Stage, wrote in his proposal for funding, ‘‘Any dramaturg spends a significant portion of his or her time on the job responding to the question, ’What is a dramaturg?’’’ And Carrie Ryan, Literary Manager of California’s La Jolla Playhouse, commented, ‘‘One thing that didn’t come with my MFA was an easy definition of dramaturgy.. . .’’ The list goes on. But in the end, no solid and final definitions of dramaturgy are really possible. Still, a general understanding of the range of roles in which a dramaturg engages can be broadly drawn.

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THE DRAMATURG’S ROLES Research One of the most prominent and widespread responsibilities for any dramaturg is serving as a researcher. In this capacity, the dramaturg gathers a wide assortment of information that can encompass the following, and more: 1. background material about the time period in which the play is set and the era’s social, political, and cultural environment, as well as any notable events 2. information about previous and particularly noteworthy productions of the work 3. material concerning any historical background, references, or actual persons featured in the play 4. a linguistic guide list that clarifies and contextualizes unfamiliar words, phrases, and colloquialisms 5. an economic outline delineating the cost of living at the time of the play, including grocery prices and average salaries.

While such research is time consuming and can be exhausting, it is also stimulating and informative, providing a fruitful learning experience. For example, in a production of Margaret Edson’s Wit, I undertook a great amount of research on John Donne’s poetry to assist the actor in understanding why the professor she portrayed is so enamored of—indeed, obsessed with—Donne’s work and his fixation on death. In Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, my dramaturg tentacles arched into the fields of history, nuclear physics, and the atomic bomb, among other realms. In Donald Margulies’s Dinner With Friends, the director even asked me to find out how long a flight from New York to Martha’s Vineyard would take.

Preparing Programs and Study Guides Another primary service rendered by most dramaturgs is writing and designing the production’s program, which may include charts, lists, or other creative material, as well as conventional narratives about the play and the playwright. These writing responsibilities extend to other areas as well, including promotional material and study guides for students of various levels who will attend the production, an endeavor that works in collaboration with the outreach branch of the theatrical organization. Furthermore, and also part of public engagement, the dramaturg often conducts post-show discussions, which provide theatergoers the opportunity to ask questions and offer comments about the staging, rehearsal process, characters, and other elements of the production. In some situations, the dramaturg may even develop seminars centered on the play and its issues.

Dramaturgy

Assisting Directors A third crucial responsibility is for the dramaturg to be present during rehearsals, offering his or her individual perspectives of the ongoing process. Making notes for the director regarding such aspects as consistencies in actors’ performances, clarity of dialogue, unclear points in the plot, problems of continuity, and other such observations can prove quite helpful. Still, this is territory that a dramaturg must tread upon lightly, being careful not to invade the director’s turf. And directors vary greatly: some invite and appreciate the observations that a dramaturg brings, while others see them as mere pests. In fact, a longtime debate has pitted the role of the dramaturg as basically a researcher and writer against one who is involved in the creative process of developing the play, through such duties as working with the playwright, offering critical input to the production process, and providing new perspectives on the play. This trio of dramaturgical duties is just the underpinning of a much broader stage on which the dramaturg performs. The broad scope of tasks that dramaturgs may undertake include the following: • Reading and assessing new plays. • Working with a playwright to develop and refine a play. • Acting as liaison between playwright and director. • Assisting the artistic director in developing a season’s repertoire. • Serving as literary managers. • Considering how plays were produced in their own time. • Identifying what kind of stage, audience, purpose, and acting for which the play was originally written. • Translating works from one language to another. • Filling the rehearsal hall with books, articles, and other pertinent resources for the cast, as well as pasting the wall with maps, photographs, timelines, and any other visual information that will assist the company.

Despite the obvious necessity of fulfilling these various tasks for a production, the importance and the role of a dramaturg—at least in America—continues to be challenged and redefined. Scholar Geoffrey Proehl confronts this controversy when he writes, ‘‘The dramaturg. . .is not finally essential to the rehearsal process. To maintain otherwise would require redefining too much theatre history. Dramaturgy . . .is, however, inseparable from theatre making, whether or not the word itself is ever used.’’ Furthermore, the role of the dramaturg is often unacknowledged, aside from a cursory mention in the production program. While complexities infiltrate the contemporary role of the dramaturg, the nature of dramaturgy is hardly new; the ancient Greeks of the fourth and

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Western Drama through the Ages fifth centuries B.C. both wrote and acted in their own plays, inevitably addressing dramaturgical issues in the process. Indeed, Susan Jonas and Geoff Proehl note that the function of dramaturgy itself ‘‘is probably as old as theater and fundamentally inseparable from it.’’ However, the modern concept of dramaturgy has undergone its own evolution. Conventional wisdom holds that dramaturgy as a field emerged in late eighteenth or early nineteenth century Germany, although, as Jonas and Proehl note, ‘‘it has antecedents throughout theater history (East and West). . .’’ The German model focused primarily on theory and criticism, a model that is still widely held and that has shaped academic studies. But the role of the dramaturg is relatively new in American theater. Early in the twentieth century, several small companies developed the philosophy of dramaturg as playwright, a vision fostered through such venues as the Washington Square Players, the Provincetown Players (who most famously launched Eugene O’Neill), The Theatre Guild, and The Group Theatre, among others. Again, this integration of playwright and dramaturg harks back to the dawn of Western drama. By the 1970s, though, this kinship had broadened considerably, due in large part to the proliferation of classes and programs in dramaturgy being offered by universities, most notably Yale. Regardless of the slippery nature of the term, dramaturgy continues to burgeon in educational programs as well as in theaters throughout the country. A critical eye continues to be leveled at this ambiguous personage, ranging from wholehearted embracement to supercilious dismissal. James Magruder jokes that he continually reconceives his dramaturgical role, creating such identities as ‘‘The Keeper of the Flame of Thespis’’ to ‘‘The Resident Egghead and Cultural Flypaper,’’ while always attempting to avoid cultural stereotyping such as ‘‘The Cheese Stands Alone.’’ Even as dramaturgy continues to proliferate and develop, it is unlikely that the position itself will ever be satisfactorily defined. ‘‘Few terms in contemporary theater practice have consistently occasioned more perplexity,’’ write Jonas and Proehl. ‘‘Individuals who find themselves listed as dramaturges on theater program often grow tired of explaining just what it is they do.. . .’’ That dramaturgs are essential to a production is indisputable. But by what name they shall be known, and by what duties they shall be defined, continues to be a work in progress.

FURTHER READING Cardullo, Bert, ed.What is Dramaturgy? New York: Lang, 1995. Castagno, Paul C., ed. Voice of the Dramaturg: Southeastern Theatre Conference. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1995. ‘‘Dramaturgy and Silence.’’ Theatre Topics 13:27. Esslin, Martin. ‘‘The Role of the Dramaturg in European Theatre.’’ Theater 10.1 (1978): 48.

Dramaturgy Hay, Peter. ‘‘American Dramaturgy: A Critical Reappraisal.’’ Performing Arts Journal 7.3 (1983). Jonas, Susan, Geoff Proehl, and Michael Lupu, eds. Dramaturgy in American Theater: A Source Book. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997. Kindelan, Nancy. Shadows of Realism: Dramaturgy and the Theories and Practices of Modernism. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996. Londre´ , Felicia Hardison. Words at Play: Creative Writing and Dramaturgy. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois Press, 2005. Magruder, James. ‘‘A Place at the Table.’’ American Theatre January 2001: 24. Morawski, Kalikst. Jean Cocteau, Dramaturg. Lublin: 1955. Proehl, Geoffrey S. ‘‘Rehearsing Dramaturgy: Olivia’s Moment.’’ Theatre Topics 9.2 (1999): 197–205. ———. ‘‘Dramaturgy and Silence.’’ Theatre Topics 13.1 (2003): 25–33. Rudakoff, Judith D. and Lynn M. Thomson. Between the Lines: The Process of Dramaturgy. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press, 2002. Ryan, Carrie. ‘‘You Can’t Tell a Dramaturg by Her Title.’’ American Theatre January 2001: 95. Schechter, Joel. ‘‘American Dramaturgs.’’ The Drama Review 20.2 (1976): 89. Suvin, Darko. To Brecht and Beyond: Soundings in Modern Dramaturgy. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1984. Theatre Topics. Dramaturgy Special Issue. Vol. 13, no. 1. March 2003. ‘‘You Can’t Tell a Dramaturg By Her Title.’’ American Theatre Jan. 2001. 22–28.

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Drama’s Stages: Theaters and Playhouses in Theatrical History Milly S. Barranger

At the heart of the theatrical experience, as British director Peter Brook suggested, is the act of seeing and being seen in a special space reserved for performance. The ancient Greeks called this space a theater, a word derived from theatron, meaning a ‘‘seeing place.’’ At one time or another during the history of Western cultures, this place for seeing has been a primitive dancing circle, an amphitheater, a church nave, a marketplace, a temporary platform, a garage, a street, a proscenium playhouse. Neither the stage’s shape, nor its location, nor the building’s architecture distinguishes a theater. Rather, the seeing place derives from the use of space to imitate human experience for audiences to see and contemplate. This seeing place is where spectators perceive the how, the what, and the why of experience enacted by others in a revelation of human behavior. Theater’s three basic components are the actor, the space, and the audience. The history of theater has been, in one sense, the changing physical relationship of actor and audience within the prepared space. Whether the physical space becomes more elaborate or less so, whether the performance occurs indoors or out, the actor-audience relationship is theater’s vital ingredient. In one sense, the formula for theater is simple: A man or woman stands in front of an audience in a special or prepared place and imitates human realities designed to entertain and instruct. In this privileged place, audiences share in the revelation of a reality separate from their daily lives, although closely related to it. Both Western and Eastern theaters have been historically divided into stage and auditorium and developed conventions regarding the relationship of

Drama’s Stages: Theaters and Playhouses in Theatrical History performer to spectator and vice versa. For example, where actors perform and the vantage point from which audiences view performances have been delineated since the earliest recorded performances in Greece and the Far East. Western audiences, for example, have moved from the hillside in the Greek open-air theaters to a place before the Christian altar to standing room around the Elizabethan theater’s platform stage, to plush seating before a curtained proscenium stage in a darkened hall, to the floor or scaffolds of a modern environmental production. In a challenge to theatrical tradition in the mid-twentieth century, a number of theater practitioners set about inverting established conventions separating stage from auditorium—actor from spectator. In an attempt to break down timehonored actor-audience relationships, modern practitioners toyed with conventions, violated them, even turned them upside down, in an attempt to engage audiences in new interactions with performers and to redefine the theatrical experience. The terms alternative and environmental are frequently used to define modern performances found in nontraditional spaces. In such cases, audiences are arranged as an interactive part of that space for the duration of the performance. Like the actors, they become part of the theatrical event in environmental productions. Traditional and nontraditional stages are found in almost all modern Western cultures. The earliest stages are found in Greece where dramatists crafted tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays to be performed in open-air theaters as civic and religious occasions.

TRADITIONAL STAGES All cultures, with the exceptions of Mayan, Aztec, Sumerian, and some Islamic cultures, from early to modern times encouraged theatrical performances and special places for seeing and enacting these events. The earliest theatrical spaces were usually flat circular areas for the enactment of rituals dealing with life and death. The priest or guru performed in a threshing circle, in a hut, or an enclosure shared with onlookers. For many years, theater historians have connected the origins of theater with agrarian and fertility rites and with special places for enactment of these rites. Early societies staged mock battles between death and life in which the king or ruler of the old year, representing death, perished in a duel with the champion of the new year. These early rituals contain the beginnings of modern theatrical conventions—enactment, imitation, and seasonal performances held in special or privileged spaces. What is certain in these early beginnings is that theater became an enactment performed in permanent structures with two components: stage and auditorium. The first such permanent theater building in Western culture existed in the curve of a hillside in Greece.

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Classical Stages The Theatre of Dionysus, the most celebrated theater of fifth century B . C . Athens, Greece, was a permanent open-air structure located on the slope of the hill below the Acropolis. The dancing circle (or orchestra) surrounded by audiences on the hillside (the auditorium) was the earliest feature of this theater. In time, two performance areas evolved: the orchestra and the area later backed by a wooden scene building (the skene) that formed a neutral background for both actors and chorus evolved. In plays written by the classical Greek playwrights, the two or three speaking actors may have performed in the orchestra, or on a raised wooden stage, although no one knows for sure. The sharing of performance space between chorus and actors and conventions, such as formal entrances, choral odes, and the spoken dialogue, dictated the structure of the plays performed there. The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes were shaped as much by the theater’s physical arrangement and conventions of choruses and masked actors as by the worldview of the playwrights. From the classical to the Hellenistic period (c. 490–330 B.C.), the theater in Greece underwent changes: wooden seats were replaced by stone; the addition of the scene building made the actors’ areas more complex, providing dressing areas, a neutral scenic background with doors for entrances and exits. A low raised stage was probably added sometime after the fifth century B. C . Nevertheless, theater remained in the open air, with well-defined places for audiences to sit and for actors and chorus to perform. This division of space within the permanent open-air structures in Greece dictated theater architecture, writing, and performance conventions for centuries. Permanent theaters in Rome (the first was the Theatre of Pompey constructed in 55 B.C.) were larger and more sumptuous structures than their Hellenistic predecessors but replicated the essential features. Moreover, they were not the temporary stages of the notable Roman writers Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, whose plays predate the oldest surviving theaters by over one hundred years. Rather, the permanent structures were for honoring gods and emperors and accommodating spectacle and sensationalism. Many were built on level ground with a large stage house (scaena)—the raised stage (pulpitum) in the Theatre of Pompey was 300 feet wide—and the auditoriums (cavea) were covered by porticos and divided by aisles. The corridors (vomitoria) provided passageways into the orchestra and auditorium. The facade (scaenae frons) of the stage house was decorated with columns, statues, and porticos and often painted or gilded. These structures met the demands for athletic and circus entertainments, including horseracing, prizefighting, wrestling, wild animals, and so on. Unlike the theaters of Greece, the Roman structures did not survive the decline of the empire and the rule of foreigners. The last record of a performance in Rome is dated 549.

Drama’s Stages: Theaters and Playhouses in Theatrical History

Medieval Stages The medieval European stages revived the open-air staging practices of Greek and Roman theaters, although there were few permanent structures. The medieval theater (c. 950–1500) began in churches with Latin playlets performed by priests to teach Christian doctrine and encourage moral behavior among spectators. Gradually, as performances became more concerned with entertainment and spectacle, they moved out of the churches into the marketplaces. Lay performers replaced priests and scripts based on biblical material grew longer and more complex, mixing the serious with the boisterous and farcical. In time, medieval secular stages took two forms: fixed and moveable. The fixed stages, the most famous of which was located in Valenciennes, France, around 1547, were rectangular platforms erected in marketplaces or town squares to celebrate religious and civic occasions. The stage for the Valenciennes Passion Play contained ‘‘mansions,’’ or huts that designated locales, and an open playing space, called the platea. Actors moved from hut to hut to indicate change in locale and performed for the most part in the platea. Mansions representing heaven and hell were placed on either end of the platform with earthly scenes of travail occurring between. The fixed stages, like the moveable stages, encouraged the telling of biblical stories sequentially, beginning with Creation and ending with Judgment Day. Fixed stages were common in many parts of Europe but in Spain and England portable stages, called carros or pageant wagons, were devised. These moveable stages had an opening playing space, a platea, and a hut serving as a changing room, a neutral background, or another playing level. Wagons were lined up in the order of the biblical scenes to be enacted and moved through the narrow streets of medieval towns stopping at various places. Audiences stood around the wagons to watch performances of the thirty-two surviving plays of the English Wakefield cycle (c. 1375) based on biblical scenes of Christ’s torture at the hands of soldiers, followed by his death on the cross. The cycle plays encouraged continuous action from scene to scene played out from wagon to wagon and influenced the later episodic playwriting of Elizabethan dramatists. By the late sixteenth century, permanent stages were built in England and Europe to house a new kind of secular entertainment, one focusing more on plays with commercial appeal performed by companies of actors. In 1576, James Burbage built London’s first theater, naming it simply ‘‘The Theatre.’’ It was an open-air structure that adopted features from various places of entertainment: inn-yards, pageant wagons, banquet halls, fixed platforms, and portable stages.

Elizabethan Stages The Globe, better known as Shakespeare’s theater, was an open-air building with a platform stage in the middle surrounded on three sides by standing room

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Western Drama through the Ages for spectators and a large enclosed balcony topped by one or two smaller roofed galleries. Built in 1599, the stage was backed by a multilevel facade as part of the superstructure, called the tiring house, used as dressing rooms, storage areas, workrooms, and for exits and entrances. A roof supported by two columns jutted out above the platform; the underside of the roof, called ‘‘the heavens,’’ was decorated with figures of the zodiac—moons, stars, and planets. Like medieval audiences, Elizabethan spectators were never far removed from the performers, especially the groundlings as those were called who stood around the platform stages to view performances. With minimal scenery and few stage properties, the Globe encouraged continuous action and the spoken word to create illusions of storms, shipwrecks, faraway islands, and castle ramparts. The Globe, The Rose, The Curtain, The Fortune, and nine other open-air playhouses, built between 1567 and 1623, featured the works of William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, John Ford, and other Elizabethan and Jacobean writers. Like the stages of Greece and medieval Europe, the Elizabethan open-air stages depicted cosmic dramas that touched all people: peasant, artist, merchant, and nobleman. Moreover, its architecture influenced the structure of the plays performed there. The open stages encouraged continuous action. The upper levels were suggestive of castle battlements and romantic balconies. The two or more levels accommodated curtained inner and upper areas for hiding and discovering people and objects; backstage thunder machines and trapdoors in the stage floor offered cosmic effects, apparitions from the underworld, and opportunities for grave diggers to meditate on mortality. Moreover, the open-air structure reminded audiences of the larger universe in which ordinary men and women were merely players.

Proscenium Theaters and Modern Stages The prototype for modern proscenium stages officially dates from the Italian Renaissance of the early seventeenth century. The Teatro Farnese at Parma, Italy, built in 1618, was one of the earliest theaters with a permanent proscenium arch. Theater historians agree that late fifteenth century illustrated editions of Terence’s plays contributed to the design of the proscenium arch. The first edition of the Roman playwright’s plays in 1493 showed illustrations of what is now called the ‘‘Terence Stage.’’ The stage is depicted as a platform backed by a continuous facade, either straight or angled and divided into a series of curtained openings, each representing the house of a different character. Later theaters in Italy were designed with elaborate stage openings with semicircular seating facing the stage. However, it was not until the Teatro Farnese, designed by Giovan Battista Aleotti,

Drama’s Stages: Theaters and Playhouses in Theatrical History was completed in 1618 did the prototype for the modern proscenium stage with arch come into prominence. In a variation of the Terence Stage, an ornamental arched facade across the front wall framed the Farnese stage, restricted the view of audiences, and separated them from the actors. The frame also had practical uses. It masked the machines and the grooves used for changing scenery (large canvas pieces painted in perspective) and other special effects. The auditorium featured U-shaped stadium seating surrounding a large open area that replicated space previously used for dancing and forms of spectacle in court theaters. Unlike the open-air theaters, the proscenium theaters evolved into stages for scenic illusion, spectacle, and entertainment. Most of the theaters and opera houses built in the Western world over the last four hundred years have been proscenium theaters with framed stages, moveable scenery, machines, lighting, sound equipment, and orchestra pits for musicians. The stage is usually hidden by a curtain until the play’s world is discovered by audiences seated in the orchestra area and tiered balconies of the darkened auditorium. The aim of playwrights (and designers) was to create behind the picture frame the illusion of recognizable worlds with drawing rooms, dining areas, streets, offices, and tenement dwellings. For over a hundred and fifty years, such playwrights as Anton Chekhov, Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw, Lillian Hellman, and Arthur Miller have crafted plays for the proscenium stage. Its box sets (three walls with a ceiling) enclosed the world of the play inhabited by middle-class characters in recognizable environs. Responding to the possibilities of recreating the physical realities of recognizable living conditions on stage, dramatists wrote plays dealing with problems of contemporary middle-class life (outdated mores, discriminatory laws, inherited disease, legal chicanery, and exploitation in the workplace) that showed individuals, especially women, victimized by repressive societies—sometimes winning but most often losing in the struggle for dignity and livelihood. Ibsen’s The Doll’s House, Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession, and Hellman’s The Little Foxes were written for stages that promised the possibility of the physical quality of real living conditions recreated on stage. Their plays demanded real rooms with transparent fourth walls, and actors dressed and moving in truthful fashion among familiar furnishings and authentic stage properties. The fusion of the ‘‘real’’ in writing and staging practices resulted in pictorial illusion as the modern theater’s chief stylistic characteristic. Playwrights readily responded to the possibilities for truthful depictions of contemporary life on stage. In general, modern Western stages reflect their prototypes in Elizabethan open stages or European indoor playhouses. Thrust or open stages are found in contemporary festival theaters celebrating Shakespeare’s work, such as the Oregon

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Western Drama through the Ages Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and the Utah Shakespearean Festival in Cedar City, and in plays and pageants celebrating historical events staged in outdoor amphitheaters. Moreover, modern thrust stages are also found in indoor theaters located in Minneapolis (the Guthrie Theater) and in Stratford, Ontario (the Shakespearean Festival Theatre). Nevertheless, proscenium stages remain in the majority with their framed, recessed stages and technology for moveable scenery, motorized lighting, and surround sound. Both types of stages offer challenges to modern playwrights creating well-made dramas or sweeping epics or musical books in the manner of August Wilson’s Fences, Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, and Arthur Laurents’s West Side Story.

NONTRADITIONAL STAGES All performers who have appeared singly or in groups wherever an audience could be gathered are background to the modern interest in alternative performance spaces. Although international in practice, nontraditional stages found in the United States and Europe are associated with political protests in the sixties in opposition to the Vietnam War. Within the last five decades, the creative works of Jerzy Grotowski (the Polish Laboratory Theatre), Julian Beck and Judith Malina (the Living Theatre), John O’Neal and Gilbert Moses (the Free Southern Theatre), Ariane Mnouchkine (The´aˆtre du Soleil), and Peter Schumann (the Bread and Puppet Theatre) have been labeled alternative or environmental theater. This type of theatrical performance rejects the conventional seating of proscenium playhouses and amphitheaters and arranges the audience as part of the playing space.

European Forerunners In modern Russia and Germany, such leaders as the inventive Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–c.1940) and Max Reinhardt (1873–1943) developed unorthodox production methods and uses of theatrical space. They are forerunners of many of the twentieth century experiments in nontraditional performance styles and the use of alternative spaces. In the 1930s in Moscow, Russian director Vsevolod Meyerhold, an associate of Konstantin Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theatre, rejected the proscenium arch as too confining for actors. He removed the front curtain, the footlights, and the proscenium. Stagehands changed scenery and properties in full view of audiences and actors performed on trapezes, slides, platforms, and ramps to arouse feelings of exhilaration in both performers and audiences. Meyerhold’s most famous production was an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General (1926). In the most striking scene, the director arranged fifteen doors around the stage

Drama’s Stages: Theaters and Playhouses in Theatrical History and a provincial official emerged simultaneously from each door to offer the inspector a bribe. In turn, Max Reinhardt explored vast acting areas, such as circus arenas to stage Oedipus the King (1910) in Berlin’s Circus Schumann remodeled into the Grosses Schauspielhouse, called his ‘‘theatre of the five thousand.’’ He dreamed of a theater on the scale of the Roman amphitheaters used to stage spectacles, circus games, and chariot races for emperors and mass audiences. In 1920, Reinhardt created his most famous spectacle based on the English morality play Jedermann (Everyman) in the square before the Salzburg Cathedral in Austria. Town criers called from the church towers, spectators became communicants, and the church square was transformed into a ritual performance. During the last fifty years, especially in the United States, many theater directors and designers looked for new theatrical spaces in warehouses, garages, factories, lofts, and abandoned churches to create new venues for performance. They reshaped all of the space available, thereby making their audiences an essential part of the theatrical event. Leading the international movement toward alternative venues for performance were Jerzy Grotowski in Poland, Julian Beck and Judith Malina in New York City, Ariane Mnouchkine in Paris, and Peter Schumann in the fields of pastoral Vermont.

Environmental Theater By definition, environmental theater rejects conventional seating and includes audiences in the arrangement of the physical space. Each performance created by Jerzy Grotowski (1933–99) at the Polish Laboratory Theatre in Opole (and then in Wroclaw) in the late 1950s began with redesigning the entire space to find the proper spectator-actor relationship. Akropolis (1962) takes place in a large room outfitted with platforms (for spectators) and passageways circling the platforms and a large boxlike structure in the center of the room (for actors). Wire struts for hanging objects, such as metal stovepipes, as reminders of events in Europe’s wartime concentration camps crisscrossed the ceiling of the room. Within the confined space, the actors in ragged shirts and trousers, wearing heavy wooden shoes and anonymous berets, build a modern extermination camp. Spectators and actors engage in contrasting Western ideals of love and human dignity with the degradation of the death camps. Akropolis ends with a procession of the condemned inmates disappearing one by one down an opening in the large box followed by silence. In order to answer the question ‘‘What is theater?’’ Grotowski evolved a concept that he called ‘‘poor’’ theater. He became convinced that theater could happen without costumes, scenery, makeup, lighting, and mechanical sound effects. Grotowski’s research eliminated everything not truly required by the actor

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Western Drama through the Ages in communion with the audience in order to arrive at deeper understandings of personal and social truths. He wrote about his methods in Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) and continued to explore for another thirty years how theater in different cultures conveys performance ‘‘truths.’’ The Living Theatre, the oldest of the collective groups in the United States, began in 1948 in a basement on Wooster Street in New York City. The talents and zeal of Julian Beck (1925–85) and Judith Malina (b. 1926) were directed toward unorthodox productions that encouraged nonviolent revolution against the policies of the U.S. government. In a dazzling act of rebellion in 1963 against both political and theatrical establishments, the Living Theatre staged The Brig, written by Kenneth Brown about a day in a Marine Corps prison for military offenders. The production replicated the caged wire, the dormitory bunk beds, overhead industrial lights, and the floor sectioned off by painted white lines demarking the restrictions imposed in the military prison. Spectators sat around the wire cage as witnesses to the dehumanizing of the eleven soldiers and as participants in society’s responsibility for sanctioning the humiliation and abuse of other human beings. Touring in the United States, Europe, and South America for almost forty years, the Living Theatre’s activities aroused controversy and debate over the role of art in society. After Julian Beck’s death in 1985, Judith Malina reformed the company on a smaller scale. The significance of the group’s work rests on its naturalistic environmental productions (The Connection and The Brig) and experimentations with altered texts promoting anarchy and social change (Frankenstein and Paradise Now). Their latter-day performances made use of nudity and athleticism, assaulted audience sensibilities with human voices and cacophonous sounds, and confronted audiences with calls for revolution in the service of Julian Beck’s mandate for a performance art dedicated to changing audience perceptions of the world. The Free Southern Theatre grew out of the civil rights movement to address issues of freedom, justice, equality, and voting rights in the American South. In 1963, John O’Neal, Gilbert Moses, and Doris Derby—all staff members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—discussed ideas for a ‘‘freedom theatre’’ in the rural South. That year in the state of Mississippi, they founded the Free Southern Theatre (FST), the American South’s first legitimate black liberation theater organized to tour poor rural areas, give free performances (‘‘No tickets needed,’’ a sign read), and train black artists in workshops. They received the energetic support of another co-producer, Richard Schechner, editor of The Drama Review and a stage director who was teaching at Tulane University in New Orleans at the time and later started the controversial environmental Performance Group, located in the Performing Garage in lower Manhattan.

Drama’s Stages: Theaters and Playhouses in Theatrical History Started as an experiment during the height of the civil rights movement and antiwar expressions, the aim of the Free Southern Theatre was to promote black theater for the African American community—black artists and audiences. The first production, Martin Duberman’s In White America, toured to communities and towns from Tougaloo, Mississippi, to New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1964. That summer three civil rights workers (James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) were brutally murdered in Mississippi. Against this backdrop of violence, FST toured a play to black communities about a legacy of pain and intolerance. Based on historical documents dating from the slave trade to the Freedom Rides and bus boycotts of the late fifties, Duberman’s play resonated with rural black audiences. Moreover, the material was readily adaptable to performances on porches of rural farmhouses, in cotton fields, local churches, and community centers. Largely youthful black audiences, many seeing a play for the first time, sat in the afternoon sun on folding chairs, benches, cots, and in back yards behind small frame houses in rural Mississippi to see In White America performed by six actors (four men and two women) and a musician. The back porches became stages; actors made entrances around corners and through screen doors leading into the houses. At times, a pickup truck with a policeman at the wheel drove by the site trolling for trouble. The first tour of In White America took the group to thirteen Mississippi towns during three weeks. Audiences applauded the speeches of black Americans (Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois) and joined spontaneously in singing with the cast. Traveling by car and van in the second season, FST toured with established plays written by black and white artists: the popular Purlie Victorious by Ossie Davis and the confounding Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. As an extension of the civil rights movement in the sixties, the company waxed and waned over the years as political ideology came into conflict with aesthetic standards. Finally, after seventeen years, with its leadership and monetary sources exhausted, the Free Southern Theatre disbanded in 1980. The´aˆtre du Soleil (Theatre of the Sun) is another group that engaged in environmental production styles in Europe in the early sixties. Founded in Paris in 1964 by Ariane Mnouchkine (b. 1939) and a group of politically committed individuals, the The´aˆtre du Soleil was established as an egalitarian commune. The notion of collaborative creations and democratic participation permeated all levels of decision-making. All members shared responsibilities of research, writing, interpretation, design, construction, and housekeeping in an effort to abolish the theatrical hierarchy of traditional companies. Nevertheless, The´aˆtre du Soleil is identified with its artistic director Ariane Mnouchkine and with the environmental stagings of L’Age d’Or (The Age of Gold) and Tambours Sur La Digue (Drums on

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Western Drama through the Ages the Dike) and Asian-inspired modes of theatrical presentation in classical and Shakespearean revivals of Les Atrides, a four-part cycle of Greek plays, and Richard II, Twelfth Night, and Henry IV, Part 1. In 1970, the company took up residence in a former munitions factory outside of Paris (the Cartoucherie in Vincennes) where they staged environmental productions that reflected the company’s commitment to left-wing political beliefs. Their productions dealt with historical revolutions and modern political theory and featured improvisations and audience participation. Nevertheless, as political fervor waned worldwide with the winding down of the Vietnam War, The´aˆtre du Soleil turned to other forms of artistic expression that overshadowed ‘‘environmental’’ trendiness or the political and social messages contained in their earlier works. Most notable was the cycle of Greek plays, called Les Atrides, and based on Euripides’ Iphigeneia at Aulis and Aeschylus’ The Oresteia that further challenged contemporary notions of theatrical presentation by incorporating ancient Indian traditions of Kutiyattam and Kathakali dance drama, and Japanese Bunraku puppetry. Another group in the sixties, Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theatre, located in Glover, Vermont, did not create an environment per se but rather performed in almost any setting: streets, fields, gravel pits, gyms, churches, and only sometimes in theaters. Born in 1934 in Silesia, Schumann emigrated from Germany to the United States in 1961. Within two years he founded the Bread and Puppet Theatre in New York City. His artistic collaborations with his wife, Elka Scott, began with the creation of street performances and antiwar parades featuring giant puppets. Mistrusting the power of words, Schumann used puppets to simplify and caricature the horrors of living in a time of potential global annihilation. Invited to take up residence at Goddard College in Vermont, Schumann assembled a troupe of puppeteers, designers, musicians, and volunteers. Each August in Glover, Vermont, at harvest time, the troupe performed in grassedover gravel pits with strolling jazz bands, rope walkers, and fire jugglers. Schumann baked sour dough rye bread (a heritage from his Silesian childhood) to share with audiences. When everyone had tasted bread in an act of social and spiritual communion, the performance began. Thus, audiences and performers participated in a time-honored ritual: the sharing of bread—the staff of life and symbol of humanity’s most basic need. In a Bread and Puppet performance, the stories are simple, the giant puppets riveting, and the tempo majestically slow. Schumann’s troupe is best known for his early antiwar and nuclear disarmament pieces: Fire, The Gray Lady Cantata, The Stations of the Cross, and A Man Says Goodbye to His Mother. More recently, The Domestic Resurrection Circus, performed each August, reinforced death and resurrection themes with twenty-foot effigies and head-sized masks of mythical

Drama’s Stages: Theaters and Playhouses in Theatrical History monsters and gods. A tall, careworn Madonna Godface with a cryptic smile and hair woven of milkweed and goldenrod dominated the landscape together with white birds with fifteen-foot wingspans (flown by three puppeteers holding long poles). They travelled across the fields as the moon rose above pinewoods reflected in the last rays of a Vermont sunset. Peter Schumann’s puppet theater employs dolls, effigies, and puppets to represent universal issues of life, death, and resurrection. For 2,500 years, drama’s stages have influenced artists and writers working within open air and indoor theaters on platform, thrust, and proscenium stages. The enclosed structures of the proscenium playhouses and the open areas of the outdoor theaters account in large measure for the types of plays written for these ancient and modern theaters. For the last quarter of the twentieth century, avant-garde groups set about rethinking, reshaping, and recreating the theatrical experience in improvised spaces for actors and audiences. Whether street performances or small rectangular rooms, the avant-garde used different kinds of space to herald alternative modes to truth-seeking within theatrical performance. The use of traditional and nontraditional stages in the twenty-first century follows the many precedents in writing and performance that frequently began with the organization of space for audiences to see and performers to be seen. To follow the ancient Greek meaning of theater, the ‘‘seeing places’’ in use today around the world are as eclectic as the writing, production styles, and audiences found in the theaters themselves.

FURTHER READING Barranger, Milly. Theatre: A Way of Seeing. Belmont, California: Thomson/ Wadsworth, 2006 Malpede, Karen. People’s Theatre in Amerika. New York: Drama Books, 1972. Shank, Theodore. Beyond the Boundaries: American Alternative Theatre. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2002.

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Theater Voice Coaching Bonnie N. Raphael

Theater voice coaches come from a number of different backgrounds and in a number of different varieties. It is their job to tend to the various vocal demands inherent in any theater production. Areas of such demand might include breathing for speech, active relaxation, voice production, loudness, range, rhythm, articulation, accents and dialects, microphone technique, vocal characterization, text analysis, heightened text, phrasing, pronunciation, accent elimination, and even singing. In an academic environment, a voice coach would most likely be a faculty member who teaches in the theater department and coaches whatever productions are presented in connection with the training program. In a professional theater environment, the voice coach would be hired either by the theater—to be at the service of all incoming directors—or by a particular director—to be in charge of all vocal areas on any production which that particular director directs. In addition, there are voice coaches who work individually with actors to help them to build their voices and perhaps to lessen a regional accent or acquire a suitable accent or other skills in order to prepare for a particular audition or role, and there are voice coaches who work with film and television actors or singing actors to help them hone their speaking capabilities for work on camera, onstage, or outdoors. Although voice coaching is perceived as a fairly specialized field of endeavor, it involves several different skills in diverse areas. Most often, the theater voice coach’s training is in theater performance, with allied interests and/or course work in vocal anatomy and physiology, and/or phonetics, and/or rhetoric and communication, and/or dramatic literature, and perhaps even singing or Alexander Technique. Some voice coaches have completed extensive work in voice therapy as

Theater Voice Coaching well, in order to be able to help an actor to avoid injury when he or she is asked to do potentially harmful things onstage (e.g., screaming, choking, coughing, speaking over a great deal of crowd or battle noise, speaking loudly while in awkward physical positions, etc.) On the most basic level, the theater voice coach is a facilitator: • The voice coach might help the director achieve his or her vision of what is needed from the actors. For example, the coach might help the director choose what sounds might be most appropriate for a given production (General American? American Stage Speech? Plantation Southern Dialect? Belfast, Northern Ireland Irish?) and might then help the actors achieve that sound. Even relatively unsophisticated audience members will sense that something is ‘‘off’’ if members of the same onstage family unit don’t sound alike in some basic ways, or if characters who have never left a small town in rural Georgia do not speak similarly. • The coach might help the actors better understand what a particular director is asking of them and might help those actors achieve the appropriate behavioral responses. For example, an actor might be asked to allow the voice to increase in age (e.g., Cyrano de Bergerac) or to sound progressively more educated during the course of a particular play (e.g., Pygmalion). By ‘‘translating’’ a given director’s descriptive terms or images into specific vocal language for the actors, and by providing exercises and strategies that will best facilitate behavioral change, the coach can mediate between these creative artists in order to help them to achieve shared goals. For example: if a director were to say that a particular character needed to be darker or more dangerous, the voice coach might suggest that the actor investigate what happens if he or she were to deepen the voice or to use less vocal range or were to speak a bit more slowly. Rather than directing the actor, the coach will present different choices and will help the actor to explore them until the best solution to the theatrical challenge is found. • The coach is frequently asked to help the actors to relax and to breathe and speak more freely in moments of ‘‘crisis’’ within the story of the play. Even if a character is dying or murdering another character or in the heat of a sword fight or trying desperately to break out of prison or to rescue a member of his or her onstage family from a fire, his or her lines must communicate clearly to a listening audience. This might require the voice coach to teach actors different breathing techniques or a new way of projecting the voice or even how best to imitate a well-known political figure’s voice and speech patterns, or how to play more than one role in the same production without being recognized, if necessary. • The coach makes it possible for the audience to have a more enjoyable experience in the theater by helping the actors to become more intelligible or to phrase their lines for easier listening or to pronounce proper names and places the same way as the other actors do, in order to minimize confusion or misunderstanding for the listeners. In order to achieve the latter, the voice coach might research pronunciations, check with the play’s director to make sure that they are in agreement, and then provide the actors with a summary of these pronunciations at the first cast read-through of the play. Then, during the course

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Western Drama through the Ages of rehearsals, the coach would serve as the ‘‘pronunciation police’’ in order to bring all the actors into unity. • When a production moves out of the rehearsal room and onto the stage for technical rehearsals, the voice coach facilitates this transition. The actors may discover that they need to project more or to be more intelligible to the audience over background music or scene shifts. Or the voice coach might help the actors determine their minimum loudness levels for any given theater, so that they can be heard even in their quietest or most intimate moments. • The voice coach is often called on to be an advocate for the actors and a mediator and facilitator between them and directors, designers, producers, physicians, or even voice therapists if and when such advocacy is called for. For instance, if an actor is playing a very large role that makes considerable demands on his or her voice, the voice coach might request the director to allow that actor to ‘‘mark’’ the most demanding scenes if they are to be rehearsed over and over again on a particular day. If an actor is playing a role that requires him to wear some challenging headware or masks (e.g., a donkey’s head for the actor playing Bottom in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream), then the voice coach might consult with the costume designer to better insure that the actors won’t strain their voices in order to make their lines heard. If an actor is speaking over amplified music, the voice coach might consult with the director and the sound designer to make sure that reasonable loudness levels are set in the underscoring. If an actor cannot be heard in a particularly dark scene in a play, the voice coach might ask the director to have the lighting designer provide a bit more light so that the audience members might hear more easily. And if, by some chance, an actor were to incur an illness that affects the voice, the voice coach might recommend a qualified local physician and then mediate between the medical team, the theater and the actor in order to produce the best result in the most efficient way. • Voice coaches qualified to do so may be asked to train choruses to speak in unison for a Greek tragedy or to sing in unison for plays like A Christmas Carol, for example. They might train members of the cast of a particular production to imitate jungle sounds or schoolyard sounds or even wind and weather noises. They might assist when actors are asked to record voice-over sequences on microphone, or may help members of an acting company create and perform war cries or even speak in a foreign or an invented language.

Not every theater department or professional company will have a voice coach on its payroll but when one is part of the production team, the results are most often very significant. When there is no voice coach available to the actors in rehearsals, they might be told that they will be required to learn a Spanish accent or a New England accent and they are expected to do so on their own. An excellent source of available dialects materials can be found at IDEA, the International Dialects of English Archive http://web.ku.edu/idea/. Or an actor needing vocal help can go to the web site of the Voice and Speech Trainers Association: http:// www.vasta.org to find a qualified professional in his or her location.

Theater Voice Coaching

FURTHER READING Becker, F. And the Stars Spoke Back: A Dialogue Coach Remembers Hollywood Players of the Sixties in Paris. Lanheim, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2004. Da Vera, Rocco, ed. Standard Speech and Other Contemporary Issues in Professional Voice and Speech Training. New York: Applause, 2000.

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Bibliography

Allensworth, Carl. The Complete Play Production Handbook. New York: Harper and Row, 1969. Banks, Rosemarie K. Theatre Culture in America, 1825–1860. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Barnes, Philip. A Companion to Post-War British Theatre. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1986. Barranger, Milly. Understanding Plays, 3rd ed. New York: Pearson, 2004. Biet, Christian and Christopho Trian. Qu’est-ce que de Theatre. Paris, France: Gallimard, 2006. Bryer, Jackson and Mary C. Hartig. The Facts on File Companion to American Drama. New York: Facts on File, 2005. Burdick, Jacques. Theater. New York: Newsweek Books, 1974. Cannan, Paul. The Emergence of Dramatic Criticism in England: From Jonson to Pope. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Chambers, Colin and Mike Prior. Playwrights’ Progress. Oxford, UK: Amber Lane, 1987. Dillon, Janette. The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Hartman, William. A Handbook to Literature. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson/ Prentice Hall, 2006. Hartnoll, Phyllis. The Oxford Companion to the Theatre. (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1951. King, Kimball, ed. Modern Dramatists: A Casebook of Major British, Irish and American Playwrights. New York: Routledge, 2001. Kullman, Colby H. and William C. Young. Theatre Companies of the World, Vol 1 and 2. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1986. Londre´, Felicia Hardison. The History of World Theater. New York: Continuum, 1991. Meserve, Walter J. American Drama to 1900: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit, Michigan: Gale, 1980.

564

Bibliography Murray, Timothy. Theatrical Legitimation. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987. Nicoll, Allardyce. The Development of the Theatre: A Study of Theatrical Art from the Beginnings to the Present Day. New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1966. ———, ed. World Drama: From Aeschylus to Anouilh. New York: Harper and Row, 1936. Powell, Henry, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. A History of American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War, 2nd ed. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951. Sobel, Bernard. The Theatre Handbook and Digest of Plays. New York: Crown Publishers, 1948. Taylor, John Russell. The Penguin Dictionary of Theatre. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966. Wells, Stanley, ed. The Oxford Companion to William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Wickham, Glynne. A History of the Theatre. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Williams, Gordon. British Theatre in the Great War: A Revaluation. London: Continuum, 2003.


Index

ABBA (musical group), 363 Abbey Theatre, 180–183, 184, 185 Abdoh, Reza, 438 Abell, Kjeld, 267 Abigail’s Party (Leigh), 500 Ablesimov, Aleksandr, 241 Abraham sacrifiant (Be´ze), 56 Absent Friends (Ayckbourn), 500 absurdist drama: American drama, 515– 516; audience’s comfort level with, 421, 523; Czech drama, 144, 148, 150; definition and history of, 411–412, 421– 422; French drama, 74–75; Indian drama, 162, 169, 174–175; Italian drama, 200; language of, 454–456; Latin American drama, 204, 205; pessimism of, 76, 421; Polish drama, 232; realism and, 77; Restoration drama, 111; surrealism and, 515. See also Dada and Dadaists; existentialism Acade´mie franc¸aise, 58, 59, 67 Achurch, Janet, 262 Acropolis (Wyspianski), 226 action, time, and place, 56, 58, 194, 280– 281, 415–416, 417, 454

actors and acting styles, 527–532; African Americans as actors (see African American drama); audience as, 45–46; Chekhov and, 246–248; costuming by, 534; creacio´n colectiva, 205; cultural curiosity of, 530; of expressionist drama, 429–430; within Greek drama, 6, 11; imagination of, 530–531; method acting, 530; in outdoor drama, 368– 369; public entertainers, 51–52; research by dramaturg for, 542; resources for, 530, 531, 560; of Roman drama, 19, 22–23, 82; of Romeo and Juliet, 467–470; sensitivity to language, 528–530; serfs as, 242; slaves as, 23; vocal and physical ease and flexibility, 530–531; voice coaches and, 559–560; women as (see women as actresses and characters) Actors’ Equity Association strike, 535 The Actors (McPherson), 303 ACT UP, 344 Adam (biblical), 85 Adamov, Arthur, 515 Adams, Hazard, 182

566

Index Adams, Lee, 361 Adams, Maude, 534 The Adding Machine (Rice), 435 Adelchi (Manzoni), 198 Adelphoe (Terence), 21, 26 Adler, Richard, 361 Adrastos, King, 7 Adredge, Theoni V., 536 Adrian I, Pope, 187 Advent, 84–85 The Adventures of an Immigrant (Passe Muraille), 134 Aeneid (Virgil), 18 Aeschylus, 6–18 passim, 62, 501, 556 Afanasjew, Jerzy, 232 African American drama: biblical drama, 326; Free Southern Theatre (FST), 554– 555; minstrel shows, 269–270, 294– 295; oral tradition and performance, 291–293, 294, 296, 299, 300; as playwrights, 273; as protest theater, 77, 423; surrealism within, 518; written tradition, nineteeth century, 293–295; written tradition, twentieth century to present, 295–301 African Americans as characters, 321, 322, 323, 325–326 African Grove Company, 293–294 African storytelling traditions, 291–292 After Margritte (Stoppard), 516 Agamemnon (Aeschylus), 14–15 Agit Prop, 421 Agnes Bernauer (Hebbel), 157 Ahrens, Lynn, 364 AIDS crisis, 332, 341–342, 343, 344–347, 363, 501 Ain’t Misbehavin’ (Waller), 363 Akropolis (Grotowski), 553 Albee, Edward, 77, 338–339, 411, 474– 484 Albee, Frankie, 479, 483 Albee Conference, 475, 476 Alberta Theatre Projects, 139 Alberti, Leon Battista, 190 ‘‘Albertus,’’ 211–212, 221–222

Alcamo, Cielo d’, 189 Alcan Arts Award, 136 Alcestis (Euripides), 517 The Alchemist (Jonson), 41–42, 418 Alekar, Satish, 169 Alekseevna, Natal’ia, 240 Aleotti, Giovan Battista, 550–551 Alexander, Mrs. John, 534 Alexander II, Tsar, 244 The Alexander Technique, 531 alexandrine form, 156 Alfieri, Vittorio, 197 alienation effects, 159, 539–540 Allan, Andrew, 129–130 All My Sons (Miller), 77 All Souls’ Day celebrations, 282 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 41, 417 Alone (Foote), 311–312 Als der Krieg zu Ende war (Frisch), 159 Alta comedia, 283 alternative theaters. See environmental theater Altizer, Thomas J. J., 327 Ame´de´e or How to Get Rid of It (Ionesco), 515–516 Amejko, Lidia, 237 The Amen Corner (Baldwin), 296 Amendments to Mr. Collier’s False and Imperfect Citations (Congreve), 123 American Buffalo (Mamet), 459 American drama: belief in contemporary drama, 302–312; biblical drama, 320– 329; Civil War era, 270–271; comedy, 421, 422–424; costume design, 533– 537; dramaturgical model, 544; existentialism within, 422; German expressionism influence on, 435–437; immigrant-based companies, 423; modern drama, 75–76; Native American theater, 423; nontraditional theaters within, 554–555; realism, 500–502; regional homogenization of, 274; Roman influence upon, 28; slavery within U.S., 269–271; Southern drama,

Index 268–274; surrealism, 514–516, 517, 518–520; U.S. Hispanic Theater, 207. See also African American drama; Native American theater; specific playwrights and genres by name American Dream (Albee), 477 American Equity, 136 American Negro Theater (ANT), 299 American Notes (Jenkin), 518 The American Play (Parks), 300 American Society of Independent Artists, 379–380 American Theatre (magazine), 541 The America Play (Parks), 518 Aminta (Tasso), 195 ‘‘Among School Children’’ (Yeats), 471 amphitheaters. See outdoor drama Amphitryon (Plautus), 190 Anagnorisis, 455, 456, 466 Anatol (Schnitzler), 158 Anchieta, Padre, 202 And Things That Go Bump In The Night (McNally), 342 Anderson, Maxwell, 326, 500 Anderson, Percy, 534 Anderson, Robert, 338, 500–501 Anderson, Barbara and Cletus, 533 Andorra (Frisch), 159 Andreini, Isabella, 51, 196 Andrews, Julie, 360 Andreyev, Leonid, 151 Andromaque (Racine), 62, 63 Andronicus, Livius, 19–20, 21 Angels in America (Kushner), 332, 344– 347 Anglican Church. See Protestantism Anglo-Norman plays, 85 Anna, Empress of Russia, 240 Anne, Queen (consort of James I), 46 Anne, Queen (consort of Richard II), 142 Annie Get Your Gun (Berlin), 359 ‘‘The Anniversaries’’ (Donne), 35 Anno Domini, 328 Another Part of the Forest (Hellman), 272 ANT (American Negro Theater), 299

antebellum playwrights, 270–271 Antigone in New York (Glowacki), 237 Antigone (Sophocles), 13–14, 521 anti-Semitism, 88–89 Antitheatrical movements, 38, 61, 159– 160. See also censoring of drama antiwar drama, 14, 16, 18, 430, 437–438, 439, 555, 556 Antoine, Andre´, 538 Anything Goes (Porter), 359 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 387, 509, 511 Aragon, Louis, 387, 389, 511–512, 513, 517 Araja, Francesco, 240 Aran Islands, 183 Arcadia Academy, 197 Arden of Faversham (anonymous), 40 Aretino, Pietro, 192–193, 194 Argentina, 202–203, 204–205, 206. See also Latin American drama ‘‘Arguments for a Theatre’’ (Barker), 449– 450 Ariadne auf Naxos (Strauss), 158 Ariosto, Ludovico, 191 Aristodemo (Dottori), 196 Aristophanes, 7, 10, 16–17, 18, 398, 406, 407, 415 Aristotle: drama defined and codified by, 57, 81, 194, 393, 395–396, 415–417, 454–455, 466, 522; later influence of, 56, 61, 194; on character, 182; on history of comedy and tragedy, 6–7, 11; translations and commentaries, 53–54, 61, 194, 417 Arlen, Harold, 360 Arlt, Roberto, 203 Arms and the Man (Shaw), 401, 419–420 Arp, Hans, 382, 383, 386 Arrabal, Fernando, 449 Arrufat, Anto´n, 204 Ars Poetica (Horace), 53 Artaud, Antonin, 437, 448, 449, 512 Arts and Letters Club Players, 128 Asche, Oscar, 359 As Is (Hoffman), 341

567

568

Index Association for Canadian Theatre History, 136 assumption plays, 276 Asturias, Miguel Angel, 205 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 31, 41, 529– 530, 531 Atellan farce, 20 Ateneo, 203 Athens, Greece, 5, 8–10, 14, 16–17, 548. See also Greek drama Atkinson, Brooks, 325 Atreus (Scaurus), 28 Attorney and Roses (Szaniawski), 231 audience: alienation effects intended for, 159; ‘‘audience’s pet’’ character, 213; defined, 5; within Greek tradition, 10; of outdoor drama, 371–372, 373–375; as performers, 45–46; readers vs., 166; relationship to artist and art, 77–78, 121–123, 152; of Restoration theater, 97; role of voice coach and, 559–560; study guides for, 542. See also theaters and playhouses Audience (Havel), 151 auditoriums, 548, 551. See also theaters and playhouses Augier, E´mile, 198, 488–489 Augustine, Saint, 314 Aulos, 11 Aulularia (Plautus), 190 Aurangzeb (Parthasarathi), 165, 168 Auric, Georges, 510 Aurispa, Giovanni, 190 Austrian drama, 157, 158, 159, 497–498, 553 authors. See playwrights Auto de los reyes magos (Spanish drama), 85, 276 Autos sacramentales, 277, 279 avant-garde drama, 285, 387 Avenue Q (Lopez and Marx), 364 Avinash (Gokhale), 171, 174 Awake and Sing (Odets), 501 Ayckbourn, Alan, 453, 500

Baader, Johannes, 384 Baargeld, Theodor, 386 Babes in Arms (Rodgers and Hart), 358 Babes in Toyland (Herbert), 358 Bacchides (Plautus), 190 Badajoz, Diego Sa´nchez de, 278 Baı¨f, Lazare de, 53 Bailegangaire (Murphy), 185 Bajazet (Racine), 63 Bakewell, Joan, 477 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 30, 407 The Bald Soprano (Ionesco), 411, 486 Baldwin, James, 296 Ball, Hugo, 380–383, 384 Balladyna (Slowacki), 217 Ballard, Lucinda, 536 ballet, Russian, 240, 508–509 Baltasar (Go´mez de Avellaneda), 282–283 BAM (Black Arts Movement), 297–299 Bandello, Matteo, 194, 467 The Band Wagon (Schwartz and Dietz), 359 Banff School of Fine Arts, 129, 139 The Bankrupt (Bjørnson), 259 Bansari (Tagore), 169 Baraka, Amiri (Leroi Jones), 298, 300–301, 339 Barbaro, Ermolao, 190 Barber, C.L., 405 The Barber of Seville (Beaumarchais), 396 Bard on the Beach, 139 Barefoot in the Park (Simon), 422 Barker, Harold, 449–450 Barker, Howard, 438 Barlach, Ernst, 430, 434 Barletta, Leo´nidas, 203 The Barn, 476 Barnes, Clive, 339–340 Barnes, Gregg, 536 Barnett, Claudia, 352 Barnum (Colemand and Stewart), 362 Baro, Balthazar, 54 Baroque style, 156, 202, 213–214, 217, 232, 277–278 Barranca abajo (Sa´nchez), 202

Index Barrett, Wilson, 317 Barrientos, Joaquı´n A´lvarez, 281 Barry, Spranger, 468 ‘‘Bars Fight’’ (Prince), 292 Bart, Lionel, 361 Bartholomew Fair (Jonson), 42, 418 Barton, Lucy, 533 Baryka, Cezary, 212 Barzun, Jacques, 47 Bash (LaBute), 306, 307 Batista, Fulgencio, 204 Battle of Bosworth Field, 33 B-Boys, 449 Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de, 70, 393, 396 Beaumont, Francis, 44 The Beautiful Game (Webber), 363 Beauty and the Beast (Disney), 364 The Beaux’ Stratagem (Farquhar), 179 Beck, Julian, 554 Beckett, Samuel: absurdist drama of, 74– 75, 76, 77, 183–184, 421, 454–455, 523; FST production of, 555; language in play, 454; metaphorical time travel within, 168; tragicomedy drama of, 410–411, 523 bedroom farce, 409. See also farce Beerbohm Tree, 317 Before Sunrise (Hauptmann), 491 Beggar on Horseback (Kaufman and Connelly), 436–437 The Beggar’s Opera (Gay), 158, 357, 360, 419 The Beggar (Sorge), 429 Behan, Brendan, 183–184 Behn, Aphra, 98, 393 Belcari, Feo, 188 Belgium, 514 belief in contemporary drama, 302–312. See also religion and religious drama Bell, George Kennedy Alan, 318, 319 Bellini, Vincenzo, 463, 467 Bells are Ringing (Comden and Green), 362 The Belzebub Sonata (Witkacy), 229–230

Benedictine abbey of Montecassino, 187 Benedictine Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland, 84 Benedikbeuren Passion play, 84–85 Bengal, India, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173 Bentley, Eric, 407 Bent (Sherman), 341 Beolco, Angelo, 195 Be´re´nice (Racine), 62, 63, 64 Bergen, Norway, 258 Bergman, Ingmar, 72 Bergson, Henri, 400, 408, 412 Berlin, Germany, 384, 385, 386, 553 Berlin, Irving, 358, 359 Berlioz, Hector, 463 Berman, Sabina, 206 Bernstein, Aline, 534–535 Bernstein, Leonard, 362, 464 Berry, Gabriel, 536 Betrayal (Pinter), 477 the Betty awards, 136 Bevan, Frank Poole, 533 Beyond (Hasenclever), 435 Be´ze, The´odore de, 56 Bhagat, Datta, 163, 168, 169, 171, 173 Bhattacharya, Malini, 173 Bialoszewski, Miron, 232–233 biblical drama. See religion and religious drama Biedermann und die Brandstifter (Frisch), 159 Bigsby, C.W.E., 302 Big White Fog (Ward), 501 Bileta´rˇka (Goldflam), 152 Billington, Michael, 477 Billy Bishop Goes to War (Gray and Peterson), 134 Bingo (Bond), 449 The Birthday Party (Pinter), 442, 457–458, 476, 480, 481 Bitter Sweet (Coward), 360 Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne, 257, 258–259 B.J. Simmons Company, 534 Black, Don, 471–472 Black Arts Movement (BAM), 297–299

569

570

Index Black Arts Repertory Theater/School, 298 Blackbird company, 139 The Black Crook (musical), 357 black drama. See African American drama ‘‘black expressionism,’’ 432 Black Nativity (Hughes), 296, 326 Blasted (Kane), 438, 440–448, 450–451 Bleak Moments (Leigh), 500 Bloodless Revolution of England, 96 Bloom, Harold, 41 Blosche, J.E., 389 Blossom Time (Romberg), 359 bluegrass festivals, 375 The Blue Pekingese (Abell), 267 Blythe, Ernest, 185 Blyth Festival, 135 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 154, 189, 191, 192 Bock, Jerry, 361 Bodas de sangre (Lorca), 285 Bohemia, 142–143. See also Czech drama and theater Bohomolec, Franciszek, 213 Boileau-Despre´aux, Nicolas, 69 Boito, Arrigo, 198 Bolivia, 205. See also Latin American drama Bolshoi Theatre, 241 Bombay, India, 167 Bond, Edward, 438, 441, 442, 449–450 ‘‘book’’ musicals, 358–359 Book of Leinster, 177–178 Booth, Edwin, 468 Borchert, Wolfgang, 433 Borg, Dominique, 469 Boublil, Alain, 363 Boucicault, Dion, 180 Bouillon, Duchess of, 68 Bounce (Soundheim), 363 Bourbon dynasty, 280 The Boy Friend (Wilson), 361 The Boy in the Basement (Inge), 338 The Boys from Syracuse (Rodgers and Hart), 358 Boys (Grochowiak), 232 The Boys in the Band (Crowley), 339–340

Bracciolini, Poggio, 190 Bradamante (Garnier), 57 Bradford, Roark, 323 Braham, David, 357 Brahminical code, 171 Branch, William B., 292 Brandes, Georg, 258, 259 Brand (Ibsen), 258 Brandstaetter, Roman, 233 Bravely Fought the Queen (Dattani), 175 Brazil, 202. See also Latin American drama Bread Alone (Patrick), 340 Bread and Puppet Theatre, 438, 556–557 Breake in a Travel (Karpowicz), 235 The Breasts of Tiresias (Apollinaire), 387, 511 Brecht, Bertolt, 158–159; adaptations of, 360; ‘‘alienation’’ attempts by, 159, 433, 539–540; characteristics of, 373–374; comedy of, 396–397; defamiliarization of the familiar, 146; influences of, 419; Kushner influenced by, 345 Brenton, Howard, 441, 449 Breton, Andre´, 387, 389, 507–508, 512 Bretton Hall College, 328 Brice, Fanny, 358 Bricusse, Leslie, 361 Bridges, Margaret, 321 The Bridge (Szaniawski), 231 The Brigadier General (Fonvizin), 241 Brigadoon (Lerner and Loewe), 360, 362 The Brig (Brown), 437, 554 Brighouse, Harold, 172 Brighton Beach Memoirs (Simon), 422 Brink, Frank, 367 Brisset, Jean-Pierre, 387 Britannicus (Racine), 62–63 British drama. See English drama British East India Company, 166 Broadway. See music and dance Broderick, Matthew, 364 Brokeback Mountain (film), 347 The Broken Banjo (Richardson), 273 Bronnen, Arnolt, 430, 433

Index Brook, Peter, 448, 546 Brooks, Mel, 363–364 Brothers in Arms (Denison), 128 Brown, Jason Robert, 364 Brown, John Mason, 325 Brown, Kenneth, 437, 554 Brown, Lenora Inez, 541 Brown, William, 293–294 The Browning Version (Rattigan), 499 bruitism, 382 Bruno, Giordano, 193 Bryan, George, 264 Bryden, Bill, 94, 329 Buchanan, George, 53 Bu¨chner, Franz, 156–157, 160 Buckingham, Duke of. See Villiers, George Buddhism, 169 Buddies in Bad Times, 136 Buenaventura, Enrique, 204, 205 Buero Vallejo, Antonio, 286 Buffalo Jump (Passe Muraille), 134 Bull, Ole, 258 Bullins, Ed, 299 Burbage, James, 549 Burbage, Richard, 467–468 The Burgers of Calais (Kaiser), 430 Burian, E.F., 148 Burke, Helen M., 179 Burke, James, 277 Burkett, Ronnie, 138 burlesque, 105, 419, 420. See also satire Burnell, Henry, 179 Burzynska, Anna, 237 Butcher, S.H., 522 Butler, Judith, 356 Bye Bye Birdie (Strouse and Adams), 361, 362 Cabaret (Kander and Ebb), 82, 361 cabaret theater, 147–148, 232, 380–384 The Cabaret Voltaire, 382, 383 The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Wiene), 435 Cadalso, Jose´ de, 281 Cadet Academy, 240

Caffe Cino, 340 Cahoots, 136 Caius Cesar Caligula (Rostworowski), 227 Calarco, Joe, 462 Caldero´n, Fernando, 202, 217 Caldero´n de la Barca, Pedro, 279 Calgary Theater festivals, 139 Calvin, John, 93 Cambises, 92 Camerata dei Bardi, 196 Camille (Dumas), 340, 488 Camino Real (Williams), 336 Cammarano, Salvatore, 198 Campbell, Patton, 536 Canace (Speroni), 194 Canada Council, 131, 135 Canadian Actors’ Equity Association, 136 Canadian Authors’ Association Award for Drama, 136 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), 129–130 Canadian Little Theatre, 128–129 Canadian Plays from Hart House Theatre, 128 Canadian Stage Company, 135 Canadian theater, 127–140; academic reputation of, 137; awards, 136–137; cultural diversity of, 139; FrenchCanadian drama, 127, 131, 136, 139; indigenous drama, 127, 132, 134, 136, 139; international associations with, 128, 138–139; international influences upon, 132, 133; megamusicals, 137– 138; radio drama, 129–130; Stratford Festival, 130–131, 139, 467, 552 Canadian Theatre Review, 138, 139 Can-Can (Porter), 359, 362 Candida (Shaw), 420 Candidates (Munsford), 269 Canterbury Festival of Music and Drama, 318, 319 ˇ apek, Josef and Karel, 145–147, 151 C The Captives (Currimbhoy), 168 Carballido, Emilio, 204 The Card Index (Rozewicz), 234

571

572

Index The Caretaker (Pinter), 457–458 Caribbean drama, 201 Caricatures (Kisielewski), 222 Carlos II, King, 277, 280 Carlson, Marvin, 61 carnival celebrations, medieval, 407 Carolina Playmakers, 271 Carolus Stuardus (Gryphius), 154 Carousel (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 360 The Carpetbagger’s Children (Foote), 311 Carreter, Fernando La´zaro, 276 The Cartoucherie, France, 556 Cary, Elizabeth, 45 Casas, Myrna, 206 The Case (Sukhovo-Kobylin), 493 Casey, Warren, 361 casteism, 170–171 Castelvetro, Ludovico, 54, 56 Castiglione, Baldassare, 192, 195 Castilian, 276 The Castle (Barker), 449 The Castle of Perseverance (morality play), 92, 93 Castro, Fidel, 204 Cataline (Ibsen), 258 Catastrophe, 54 ‘‘catastrophism,’’ 449–450 Catherine de Me´dici, 50 Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 240–241, 242 Catholic Church and Catholicism: antitheater stance of, 61; within Aran Islands, 183; within Bohemia, 143; within England, 95, 316–317; within France, 48; influence on LaBute, 306; within Ireland, 180, 185; within Latin America, 201; medieval mystery plays, 91; parodies of, 210; Spanish drama dominated by, 275, 278. See also religion and religious drama Catholic University, 203 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Williams), 273, 336–337 Cats (Webber), 137, 361, 363

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (Brecht), 146, 396–397 Cavalleria rusticana (Verga), 199 CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 129–130 Cecchi, Giovanmaria, 194 Cˇech a Neˇmec (Sˇteˇpa´nek), 144 Celebration (Pinter), 476, 479, 480–482 Celestina (Rojas), 277 Celinde (Baro), 54 censoring of drama: within England, 72, 123, 317, 318, 320, 325, 419; within France, 52, 69, 70; within Poland, 214; within Spain, 286. See also antitheatrical movements The Censor (Neilson), 441, 450 Centaur (Montreal), 135 Center Stage, Baltimore, 541 Central America, 206. See also Latin American drama; specific countries by name Centre for Medieval Studies’ Poculi Ludique Societas, University of Toronto, 328 Cervantes, Miguel de, 279, 280 ˇ esky´ Krumlov, 143 C Chaikin, Joseph, 438 Chalmers awards, 136 Chamber plays (Strindberg), 266 Champion, Gower, 362 Chandalika (Tagore), 174 Chaney, James, 555 The Changing Room (Storey), 499–500 Channing, Carol, 537 Chapelain, Jean, 58, 59 Chaplin, Charlie, 408, 509 characters. See dramatis personae; stock figures Charlemagne, 187 Charles I, King of England, 33, 46, 95, 154 Charles II, King of England, 33, 95, 96–97, 111, 123. See also English drama, Restoration drama Charles IX, King of France, 50 Charlottetown Festival, 132

Index Charter 77, 151 The Chaste Maid of Cheapside (Middleton), 43 Chaucer, 82–83, 87, 91, 482 Chekhov, Anton, 243–255; background, 243–245; career, 244–246; The Carpetbagger’s Children (Foote) written in homage to, 311; The Cherry Orchard, 245–247, 249, 250–251, 253–254, 255, 495–496, 504–505; essence of, 254– 255; Ivanov, 245, 246; realism, 495– 496, 499, 501, 504–505; The Seagull, 245–255 passim, 337, 495–496, 530; significance of, 246–255, 499; technique of, 251–254; The Three Sisters, 245–253 passim, 255, 311, 411, 495–496; tragicomedies of, 410, 411; Uncle Vanya, 245, 247–252passim, 255, 394, 410, 495–496; universal themes, 248, 250–251; Williams’s adaptation of The Seagull, 337 Chekhov, Pavel, 243 Chelsea, England, 73 Cherokee Reservation, North Carolina, 370–371 The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov), 245–247, 249, 250–251, 253–254, 255, 495–496, 504–505 Chester cycle (mystery plays), 36, 87, 89– 90, 93, 316, 318, 416 The Cheviot, the Stag, and the Black, Black Oil (McGrath), 421 Chiarelli, Luigi, 199 Chicago (Kander and Ebb), 361–362 Chicago ‘70 (Toronto Workshop Productions), 133 Chicano El Teatro Campesino, 423 Chicano Theater, 207 Children’s Hour (BBC), 320 The Children’s Hour (Hellman), 272, 334, 500–501 Childress, Alice, 299 Chile, 203, 204, 205, 206. See also Latin American drama Chinese theater within America, 423

Chinoy, Helen, 539 Chislett, Anne, 135 Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Disney), 364 Choral poetry, 6, 7–8, 9–10 choregos, 9 choruses, 457, 560 A Chorus Line (Hamlisch and Kleban), 361 ‘‘A Chrestomathy of Twenty-Two Answers’’ (Wellman), 518 Christiania Theatre, 257, 258, 259 Christianity. See Jesus Christ; religion and religious drama The Christian King (Barrett), 317 Christian Science Church, 308, 309 A Christmas Carol (Dickens), 86 Christmas celebrations, 84–85, 178, 276, 296 Christopher Blake (Hart), 437 Christopher Columbus (Ghelderode), 514 Chronicles of Hell (Ghelderode), 514 Chu Chin Chow (Norton and Asche), 359 Churches, 83–85, 549. See also Catholic Church and Catholicism; Protestantism; religion and religious drama Churchill, Caryl, 421, 516 Cibber, Theophilus and Jane (Jenny), 468 ´ lvarez de, 281 Cienfuegos, Nicasio A Cinna (Corneille), 60 circuses, 138 Circus Schumann, 553 Cirque du Soleil, 138 Citadel Theatre, 131 city comedy, 40, 42–44 City Dionysia, 5–13 passim, 415 Civil Rights Movement within America, 297, 340, 423, 554–555 Clair, Rene, 388–389 Clark, William S., 177, 178 Class-determined language of characters, 54 classical drama: chorus within, 457; defined, 4–5; influence on Czech drama, 145; influence within

573

574

Index Renaissance intellectual life, 32–33; revival companies, 139; sexual confusion within, 333; studia humanitatis, 189; theaters and playhouses of, 548. See also Greek drama; Roman drama Claudian, 188 Claveret, Jean, 54 Clean Break, 172 Cleisthenes of Sicyon, 7 Clement V, Pope, 315 Cleopatra (Delfino), 196 Cleopatra (Giraldi), 194 Cle´opaˆtre captive (Jodelle), 53 Clerk’s Tale (Chaucer), 91 Cleveland (Wellman), 518 Clizia (Machiavelli), 192 Cloon, Ireland, 182 ‘‘closet drama,’’ 45 Cloud Nine (Churchill), 421 clown characters, 396–397. See also stock figures clowning, 531 Cocteau, Jean, 508–510, 512 Cohan, George M., 358 Cole, Jack, 362 Cole, Toby, 539 Coleman, Cy, 362 Collection Dada (Tzara), 383 Collett, Camilla, 262 Collier, Jeremy, 98, 121–123 Cologne, Germany, 151, 386 Colo´n, Miriam, 207 colonial-era Southern drama, 268–269 The Colored Museum (Wolfe), 299–300 Color Struck (Hurston), 273 Colt, Alvin, 536 Columbia, 204, 205. See also Latin American drama Comden, Betty, 362 comedies, 391–413, 414–424; alta comedia, 283; American drama, 422– 424; burlesque, 105, 419, 420; cabarets, 147–148, 232, 380–384; characteristics and purpose of, 54, 123, 182, 391–394,

412–413, 414, 415–416, 423–424; city comedy, 40, 42–44; comedia, 278; comedia de magia, 281–282; comedias de capa y espada, 279; come´die-ballet, 66; Come´die-Franc¸aise, 68, 69–70; comedie larmoyante, 402–403; Come´diens du Roi, 51, 52, 54; ‘‘Comedies of Humors,’’ 41–42; comedy of manners, 98, 111–112, 121, 400–403, 418–419, 420; commedia dell’arte, Czech drama, 145–147; commedia dell’arte, defined, 407; commedia dell’arte, in Molie`re’s plays, 418; commedia dell’arte, in Shakespeare’s plays, 418; commedia dell’arte, Italian drama, 50–51, 195– 196, 197, 200, 416–417; commedia dell’arte, in Polish drama, 221–222; commedia dell’arte, within America, 423; commedia dell’arte, within Russia, 240; commedia popolare o rusticale, 195; communal emphasis within, 397, 406; criticism of, 121–123; of Czech drama, 145, 146; farce, 20, 142, 195, 204, 406– 409; of French Neoclassical drama, 51– 52, 53, 54–55, 58, 64, 65, 66–67; within Greek drama, 5–6, 7, 10, 16; hubris of characters within, 522; of Italian Renaissance, 189–196, 416–417; komoidia, defined, 16; within Latin American drama, 204; medieval comic tradition, 395, 407, 416; New Comedy, 17–18, 23, 25, 400, 415; Old Comedy, 8, 16, 415 (see also Aristophanes); parodies, 195, 210, 211–212, 295, 299; physical humor, 195–196, 407; Polish Theater, 211–212, 213, 219–220, 235– 236; radical, 420–421; resiliency of characters within, 411; of Restoration drama, 98, 117–118, 418–419; of Restoration drama (‘‘comedy of manners’’), 111–120; Roman drama, 20, 23– 26; romantic, 403–406; of Russian drama, 241; ‘‘safetyvalve’’ theory of, 405, 407; Sainetes, 281; of Shakespeare, 40–41, 417–418; sitcoms, 28, 221–222;

Index stock figures, 195–196, 394–397, 416, 418; tragedies vs., 412–413. See also Dada and Dadaists; satire; tragicomedies Comedy of Errors (Shakespeare), 28 Come le foglie (Giacosa), 198 The Coming of Christ (Masefield), 318–319 Coming of The Magi, 85 communism, 148, 167–168, 169, 204, 432, 497, 508 companies. See theaters and playhouses; specific companies by name Company (Sondheim), 362 Compendio della poesia tragicomica (Guarini), 57 ‘‘compilation revue,’’ 362–363 Comte, Auguste, 491, 505. See also scientific positivism concept musical, 362 La Confre´rie de la Passion et Re´surrection de Notre-Seigneur, 48–49 Congreve, William, 123, 400–401, 402, 408, 418 A Connecticut Yankee (Rodgers and Hart), 358 The Connection (The Living Theatre production), 554 Connelly, Marc, 320–321, 323–326, 436–437 The Conquest of Granada (Dryden), 98, 99–104, 105–111 Conrad, Joseph, 220 The Conscious Lovers (Steele), 179–180 The Constant Prince (Caldero´n), 217 The Constant Wife (Maugham), 498 The Contractor (Storey), 485 Convent of Port-Royal, 61 Copenhagen (Frayn), 542 The Coral (Kaiser), 431, 432 Corneille, Pierre, 58–61, 62, 64, 67 Corona de sombra (Usigli), 203 Corpus Christi (McNally), 329, 344 Corpus Christi plays, 86, 178, 315–316, 328 The Corral de la Cruz, 278

The Corral del Prı´ncipe, 278 Corrigan, Robert, 410 Cosı` e` (se vi pare) (Pirandello), 199 Cossa, Roberto, 204 Costa Rica, 206. See also Latin American drama Costuming, 90, 533–537 Cota, Rodrigo de, 276 Coulter, John, 130 Council of Trent, 196 The Countess Cathleen (Yeats), 180 The Country Wife (Wycherley), 103, 112– 120, 121–122, 393–394, 402 County Galway, 185 Courtship (Foote), 310 Coward, Noel, 360, 403, 420–421, 453 The Crackwalker (Thompson), 134 Cracow, Poland, 209, 222–223, 226 Craig, Gordon, 225 Creacio´n colectiva, 205 The Creditors (Strindberg), 265 Creeps (Freeman), 135 Creso (Delfino), 196 The Crest, 130 Crimes of The Heart (Henley), 274 Critical burlesque, 105–111 Critical realism, 486, 498. See also realism Critics. See dramatic criticism The Critic (Sheridan), 409 Cromwell, Oliver, 95, 96 Cromwell, Richard, 95 crop cycle drama, 189 Cross and Sword (Green), 367 Crothers, Rachel, 500 Crowley, Mart, 339–340 A Crucial Week in the Life of a Grocer’s Assistant (Murphy), 185 The Crucible (Miller), 501 Cruz, Ramo´n de la, 281 The Cry (Abell), 267 Cry of the Wild Ram (Brink), 367 Cuatrotablas, 205 Cuba, 202, 204, 206, 207. See also Latin American drama Cubana de Acero, 204

575

576

Index Cuchulain cycle (Yeats), 182 Cukor, George, 468 Cummings, E.E., 514, 519 The Cure (Foreman), 520 Currimbhoy, Asif, 168, 175 The Curse (Wyspianski), 223 Cusanus, Nicolaus, 190 Cushman, Charlotte, 467, 468 Custis, George Washington Park, 269 The Cuttlefish (Witkacy), 229–230 cycle plays. See mystery plays Cymbeline (Shakespeare), 41 Czech drama and theater, 142–152 Czechowicz, Jozef, 232 Dacier, Andre´, 54, 69 Dada and Dadaists, 379–390; beginnings of, 380–384; Bruitism, 382; characteristics and purpose of, 379– 380, 381, 384, 385; in France, 386–389; in Germany, 384–386; Lebel following, 448; literary Dada, 385–386; Polish drama and, 233; surrealism vs., 509; theater of the absurd influenced by, 421–422. See also absurdist drama ‘‘Dada manifesto, 1918’’ (Tzara), 383 Dada Prophesy (Blosche), 389 Dafne (Rinuccini and Peri), 196–197 Dalit Sahitya movement, 168, 169 Damn Yankees (Adler and Ross), 361, 362 dance and music. See ballet, Russian; music and dance Dance Like A Man (Dattani), 171 The Dance of Death (Strindberg), 266 Dancing at Lughnasa (Friel), 184 The Dancing Years (Novello), 360 Danes, Clare, 467, 469 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 198 Dante, 189, 198 The Danton Case (Przybyszewska), 219 Dantons Tod (Bu¨chner), 156 D’Argenson, Police Chief, 68–69 The Dark at The Top of The Stairs (Inge), 338 dark comedies. See tragicomedies

Dark Harvest (Ringwood), 129 Dark Ride (Jenkin), 518 Darwin, Charles, 505 Darwin’s Flood (Wilson), 516–517 Das, Gurcharan, 163–164, 166–167, 173 Das Goldene Vlien (Grillparzer), 157 Das Kapital (Marx), 505 Dattani, Mahesh, 162, 164, 169–175 passim Da¨ubler, Theodor, 383 The Daughters of Babylon (Barrett), 317 Davenant, William, 97, 98–99, 105 Davies, Robertson, 130 Davis, Harry, 370, 373 Davis, Ossie, 555 A Day By the Sea (Hunter), 499 Day of Absence (Ward), 298–299 Days without End (O’Neill), 436 DDF (Dominion Drama Festival), 128– 129, 130 Dead Mother (Greenspan), 518–519 Deafman Glance (Wilson), 517 Death and Buried (Rozewicz), 234 The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche (Kilroy), 184 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 76, 437, 456, 457, 459–460, 521–522 Death of Herod (N-Town Cycle), 92 The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole World (Parks), 518 Decamerone (Boccaccio), 154, 191 The Deep Blue Sea (Rattigan), 499 Defense of Poesy (Sidney), 38 Dekker, Thomas, 40, 43, 487 De Koven, Reginald, 357 ‘‘De l’art de la Trage´die’’ (La Taille), 56 Delfino, Cardinal Giovanni, 196 A Delicate Balance (Albee), 482 Deliverance (Wyspianski), 225, 230–231 The Deliverer, 328 Della Valle, Federico, 196 The Deluge (Barlach), 430 De Mare´, Rolf, 389 DeMille, Agnes, 362 Denison, Merrill, 128

Index Denmark, 257, 266–267. See also Scandinavian drama Dennis, John, 123 De Norville, Le Sieur, 54 Der Besuch der alten Dame (Du¨rrenmatt), 159, 160 Der Biberpelz (Hauptmann), 157 Derby, Doris, 554 Der gestiefelte Kater (Tieck), 156 Der Hauptmann von Ko¨penick (Zuckmayer), 158 Der Hofmeister (Lenz), 155 Der kaukasische Kreidekreis (Brecht), 159 ¨ cker (Mu¨ller and Mu¨ller), 159 Der Lohnd U Der Rosenkavalier (Strauss), 158 Der zerbrochene Krug (Kleist), 156 Deshpande, G.P., 167–168, 169, 172 Design for Living (Coward), 403 Des Lauriers, Nicolas, 52 Des Masures, Louis, 56 De spectaculis (Tertulian), 82 The Destiny of Me (Kramer), 342 Det Norske Teater, 258 Deus ex machina, 11 Deverell, Rex, 135 Devi, Mahasweta, 168, 173 The Devil to Pay (Sayer), 319 Diaghilev, Serge, 508 Dialects for actors, 531 Dia´logo entre el Amor y un viejo (Cota), 276 Dialogue: class-determined language of characters, 54; dialects for actors, 531; vocal and physical ease of actors, 530– 531; voice training, 558–560 Diary (Gombrowicz), 230 The Diary of a Scoundrel (Ostrovsky), 493–494 Dı´az, Jorge, 204 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 467, 469, 470 Dicenta, Joaquı´n, 283–284 Dickens, Charles, 86 Dickson, Mary, 307 Diderot, Denis, 151, 488 Didone (Giraldi), 194

Die Aktion (journal), 381 Die Ermittlung, Oratorium in 11 Gesa¨ngen (Weiss), 159 Die Jungfrau von Orleans (Schiller), 156 Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (Wagner), 154 Die Physiker (Du¨rrenmatt), 159 Die Ra¨uber (Schiller), 155 Dies Irae (Wildgans), 430 Die Soldaten (Lenz), 155 Dietz, Howard, 359 Die Wieber (Hauptmann), 157, 160 Dinner With Friends (Margulies), 542 Diomedes, 53 Dionysus, 5–13 passim, 415 Directors and directing style, 538–540; Chekhov and, 248–250; creacio´n colectiva, 205; of expressionist drama, 433–435; of Latin American Theater, 203; within Polish Theater, 235; research by dramaturg for, 543–544; responsibilities of, 539–540; voice coaches and, 558–560. See also specific directors by name Directors on Directing (Cole and Chinoy), 539 Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, 364 Disce´polo, Armando, 203 ‘‘The Disciplined Ones,’’ 188 Discours sur le poe`me dramatique (Corneille), 59, 60, 61 Disney corporation, 364 The Distance From Here (LaBute), 307 dithyramb, 6, 7, 8, 9 Divadelnı´ noviny (journal), 151 Divadlo (journal), 151 Divadlo za branou (Topol), 149 Divinas palabras (Valle-Incla´n), 285 Dixon, Victor, 278–279 Dmitrevskii, Ivan, 240, 241 Dmitri The Imposter (Sumarokov), 240, 241 Doctor Faustus (Marlowe), 40, 92–93 The Doctor in Spite of Himself (Molie`re), 407–408

577

578

Index docudrama, 134 Dolan, Judith, 536 The Doldrummers (Currimbhoy), 175 Dolezˇel, Lubomir, 146 A Doll’s House (Ibsen), 71, 181, 259–263, 265, 456, 489, 504 The Domestic Resurrection Circus (Bread and Puppet Theater), 556–557 Dominion Drama Festival (DDF), 128– 129, 130 Don A´lvaro o la fuerza del sino (Rivas), 282 Donatus, Aelius, 53, 54, 57, 190 Don Carlos (Schiller), 155, 156 Don Juan character, 280, 282 Don Juan Tenorio (Zorrilla), 282–283 Donne, John, 35, 542 Donnellys trilogy (Reaney), 135 Don Quijote (Cervantes), 280 The Dora awards, 136 Dottori, Carlo de’, 196 Double Cross (Kilroy), 184 Dovizi, Bernardo, da Bibbiena, 192 Downer, Alan S., 324–325 Drabinsky, Garth, 137–138 Drag performers, 333, 340. See also gay drama Dragu´n, Osvaldo, 204 The Drag (West), 333–334 drama, defined, 4–5 The Drama of King Shotoway (Brown), 293–294 dramatic criticism, 105, 106–108, 111, 121–122, 144, 207–208. See also satire Dramatis personae, 224, 232–233 dramaturgy, 541–544 A Dream Play (Strindberg), 265, 266, 427, 437, 438, 508 Dreigroschenoper (Brecht), 158 Dresden, Germany, 216, 430 Dryden, John, 96–97, 98–104, 105 Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing (Highway), 137, 139 Du Bellay, Joachim, 53 Duberman, Martin, 555 Dublin, Ireland, 178, 179

Du Bois, Raoul Pe`ne, 536 Du Bois, W.E.B., 321, 325 Duchamp, Marcel, 379–380, 384, 389 The Duchess of Malfi (Webster), 44, 45 Duke’s Company, 97 Duke University, 94 n.1 dulszczyzna, 222 Dumas, Alexandre, 198, 340, 488 Du Maurier World Stage, 139 The Dumb Waiter (Pinter), 442 Durey, Louis, 510 Durham, England, 93–94 Du¨rrenmatt, Friedrich, 142, 152, 159, 160 Dutch drama, 91 Dutchman (Baraka), 298 Dutt, Utpal, 171, 172 Dynamo (O’Neill), 502 Dyscolos (Menander), 17–18, 23 Early English Stages (Wickham), 328 Early Morning (Bond), 438 Earth Spirit (Wedekind), 428 Easter drama, 83–84, 142, 187, 209–210, 276, 327–328 Ebb, Fred, 342, 361–362 Eclogue (Siculus), 188 Ecstasy (Leigh), 500 The Ecstasy of Rita Joe (Ryga), 132 Eden End (Priestley), 499 Eden (O’Brien), 303 The Editor (Bjørnson), 259 Edmonton, Canada, 136, 139 Edson, Margaret, 542 Edward Albee: A Singular Journey (Gussow), 477 Edward II (Marlowe), 40 Effenberger, Vratislav, 148 Egle (Giraldi Cinthio), 194–195 E´gloga (Madrid), 276 Egmont (Goethe), 155 The Eiffel Tower Wedding Party (Cocteau), 510 Einen Jux will er sich machen (Nestroy), 157 Ekkyklema, 11

Index El burlador de Sevilla (Molina), 280, 282 El castigo sin venganza (Vega), 278–279 El cepillo de dientes (Dı´az), 204 El cerco de Numancia (Cervantes), 280 El concierto de San Ovidio (Buero Vallejo), 286 Electra (Galdo´s), 283 Electric Company (Vancouver), 140 Elektra (Strauss), 158 El gesticulador (Usigli), 203 Elgin Theatre/Winter Garden complex, 137 El gran teatro del mundo (Caldero´n de la Barca), 279 Eliot, T.S., 319 Elizabeth, Empress of Russia, 240 Elizabethan theater. See English drama, Elizabethan; Shakespeare, William Elizabeth I, Queen, 33 Elkunchwar, Mahesh, 174 Ellington, Duke, 363 El me´dico de su honra (Caldero´n), 279 El puente (Gorostiza), 204 El sen˜or presidente (Pavlovsky), 205 El sı´ de las nin˜as (Moratı´n), 281 El tanto por ciento (Ayala), 283 E´luard, Paul, 387, 388 Emigrants (Mrozek), 236 Emilia Galotti (Lessing), 154, 160, 488 Emmett, Dan, 295 The Emperor Jones (O’Neill), 436 The Empty Space (Brook), 448 Encina, Juan del, 276–277, 278 Endgame (Beckett), 410, 523 An Enemy of The People (Ibsen), 264–265 English-Canadian drama. See Canadian theater English drama: anti-realism, 448–449; biblical drama, revival of, 317–320; censorship of, 72, 123, 317, 318, 320, 325, 419, 449–450; Colonial-era drama by English troops, 268; comedy, modern, 420–422; existentialism, 422; expressionism, 438; Glorious

Revolution, 96; Indian drama and, 166; within Ireland, 178–179; Jacobean drama, 33, 42, 316, 487; kitchen sink drama, 452–453; medieval, 36, 86–92, 93–94, 549 (see also Medieval drama); modern, 72–74, 326–329; musical theater, 357, 359–363. (See also Webber, Andrew Lloyd); realism, 487, 498–500, 505; Sloane Square, 73; surrealism, 516–517; terms, 95; Yeats on, 181 English drama, Elizabethan, 30–46; characters of, 44–45; city comedy, 42– 44; historical background, 30–35; Jonson, 39, 41–42, 45–46, 398–399, 418; Kyd, 38–39; local settings for, 40; Marlowe, 39–40; the masque, 45–46; medieval legacies of, 36; mystery plays, disappearance of, 93; Polish theater and, 216–217; realism, 487; Roman influence upon, 28; Russian adaptations of, 239; Senecan influence, 81, 522; theaters of, 37–38, 366, 373, 549–550; women of, 40, 45, 46. See also Shakespeare, William English drama, Restoration: audience composition during, 97; Charles II, King, 33, 95, 96–97, 111, 123; comedy of manners, 111–112, 121, 418–419; criticism of, 108, 121–123; Dryden, 96– 97, 98–104, 105; euphemisms employed by, 117–118; Interregnum period, 96, 98, 123; within Ireland, 179, 180; moral laxity of, 108; perception and invention by writers, 104; realism within, 487–488; special effects and stage design, 97; terms and historical background, 34–35, 95–98; Villiers, 105–111; women during, 97, 98, 102– 103; Wycherley, 95–123 English Drama Society, 318 Enlightenment theater, 143, 154, 241, 242, 281 Enrico IV (Pirandello), 199 Entr’acte (Picabia and Clair), 388–389 Entremeses, 280

579

580

Index Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (Berman), 206 Environmental theater, 553–557 ‘‘E´patez le bourgeois’’ (‘‘shock the bourgeois’’), 448 Epheboi, 9 Epicoene (Jonson), 42 epic poetry, 99 Epiphany, 84, 276 Epistles (Horace), 20 Epitasis, 54 Ermenegildo martire (Pallavicino), 196 Ermenegildo (Tesauro), 196 Ernst, Max, 386 Eros at Breakfast (Davies), 130 Escambray, 204 The Escape, or A Leap for Freedom (Brown), 294 Eslava, Ferna´ndez de, 202 Esperpento, 285 ‘‘Essay on Comedy’’ (Meredith), 399, 400 Esslin, Martin, 150, 411 Este court, 191 Estienne, Charles, 53 Etruscans, 19 Eucharistic plays, 277, 314–316. See also religion and religious drama Euge`ne (Jodelle), 53 Euge´nie (Beaumarchais), 70 Eumenides (Aeschylus), 10, 15 Euripides: as character in the Frogs, 18, 62; Hippolytus, 63; as icon of Greek tragedy, 12; influence on French Neoclassical drama, 53; influence on Goethe, 155; modern performances of, 17, 517, 556; realism of, 485–486; Thesmophoriazusae as parody of, 10; Trojan Women, 14 Evam Indrajit (Sircar), 163, 172, 174–175 Evan of Earth (Patrick), 340 Evanthius, 53 Evening of The Bearded Heart (Dada production), 387–388 Everyman (moral plays), 36, 91–92, 94, 158, 210, 230–231, 318

Everyman (Poel’s production), 318 Everything in the Garden (Albee), 339 Evita (Webber), 363 existentialism, 162, 183–184, 199, 217, 231, 232, 411, 422. See also absurdist drama The Expense of Spirit (Fox), 438–439 Experimental Theater movement, 203– 205, 238 n.2 expressionism, 425–439; African American drama, 297–298; beginnings of, 426–430; ‘‘black expressionism,’’ 432; Czech drama, 145–147; Dada and, 383–384; decline of, 433–435; directors of, 433–435; within German drama, 158, 430–433; German influence on U.S. drama, 435–437; within Latin American Theater, 203; Polish Theater, 227; realistic elements combined with, 77; revival of, 437–439; Scandinavian playwrights as, 265, 266; Schreidramen (‘‘scream plays’’), 429–430, 433 Fabian Society, 73 Fabula cothurnata, 20 Fabulae Atellanae, 20 Fabulae cothurnatae, 26 Fabulae palliatae, 20, 23–24 Fabulae praetextae, 20, 26, 28 Fabulae togatae, 20, 24 Factory Theatre, 133, 136 fairground troupes, 69 Fairy tales, 145, 146, 197, 212, 217, 232 The Faith Healer (Friel), 184, 311 Falk, August, 266 Fallen Angels (Coward), 420–421 The False Prude (The´aˆtre-Italien), 68 Falsettos (Finn), 363 Falstaff (Boito), 198 The Fantasticks (Jones and Schmidt), 361 Fantazy (Slowacki), 217 Far as the Eye Can See (Passe Muraille), 134 farce, 20, 142, 195, 204, 406–409. See also comedies

Index The Farmers’ Revolt (Passe Muraille), 134 The Farm Show (Passe Muraille), 134 Farquhar, George, 179 Farse cavaiole, 195 Father Marek (Slowacki), 217 The Father (Strindberg), 265, 426, 492 Faulkner, William, 272 Faust (Goethe), 155, 157, 230–231 Favola d’Orfeo (Poliziano), 188, 194–195 Fay, Frank J., 180 Fay, W.G., 180 Feast of Corpus Christi, 86, 178, 315–316, 328 Feast of Fools, 405–406 Feast of the Assumption, 276 Federal Theatre Project, 534, 535 Fehling, Ju¨rgen, 434 The Feldenkrais method, 531 Feldman, Sharon, 286 Felipe II, King of Spain, 278 feminist drama: African American plays, 299; expressionist devices of playwrights, 436; Ibsen’s plays as, 262, 489; modern drama, 77; radical comedy of, 421; theaters and playhouses of, 136, 139. See also entries at Women Fences (Wilson), 300 Ferna´ndez, Lucas, 276–277, 278 Ferrara, Italy, 192 Ferreira, Maria, 206 Fescennine verses, 19 Festival de the´aˆtre des Ame´riques, 139 Festival Lennoxville, 134 Festival of Dionysus, 5–13 passim, 415 Feydeau, Georges, 409 Fiddler on the Roof (Bock and Harnick), 361, 362 Fidlovacˇka (Tyl), 144 Field, Joseph M., 270 Field Day Theatre Company, 185 Fields, Dorothy, 362 Fierstein, Harvey, 340–341 The Fiery Furnace (Russian drama), 239 5th of July (Wilson), 340 Fifty Million Frenchmen (Porter), 359

Filewood, Alan, 128 Filidh, 181 Filippo, Eduardo De, 200 Film is Evil: Radio is Good (Foreman), 520 Final Solutions (Dattani), 169 Finian’s Rainbow (Harburg and Lane), 360 Finn, William, 363 Finney, Gail, 262 Finnish companies within America, 423 The Fire and Rain (Karnad), 165, 170–171 ‘‘The First Celestial Adventure of Mr. Antipyrine’’ (Tzara), 383 First Dada Fair, 385 Fischerova´, Daniela, 152 Fitch, Clyde, 333 ‘‘The Flagellants,’’ 188 Flaherty, Stephen, 364 A Flea in Her Ear (Feydeau), 409 Fletcher, Alan J., 177–178 Fletcher, John, 44 Fliesser, Marieluise, 433 Flight out of Time (Ball), 381 Florence, Italy, 192, 196 Florida, United States, 207, 367 Florodora (musical), 357 Flower Drum Song (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 360 Floyd Collins (Guettel), 364 ‘‘Fluid Skeptic’’ (Baargeld), 386 Fo, Dario, 200 folk entertainment during English Renaissance, 36 Follies (Sondheim), 362 Follies (Ziegfeld), 358, 359 Fonvizin, Denis, 241 Foote, Horton, 274, 308–312 Foote, Lillian Vallish, 308 Fop-Suitor (Zablocki), 213, 221 For colored girls who have considered suicide (Shange´), 299 Ford, John, 40, 44–45 Forefathers Eve (Mickiewicz), 214–216, 221, 222, 225, 230–231 Foreman, Richard, 519–520 The Forest (Ostrovsky), 494

581

582

Index Forest Theatre, 372 Formicone (Mantovano), 191 Formless Jewel (Tagore), 164 Fornaro, Marita, 206 Forrest, George, 361 Fortinbras Got Drunk (Glowacki), 237 Fortune, My Foe (Davies), 130 Fortune and Men’s Eyes (Herbert), 128, 132 The Fortunes of the Good Soldier (Hasˇek), 148 42nd Street (musical), 362 Forum (musical), 362 Foscolo, Ugo, 198 Fosse, Bob, 362 Fosse, Jon, 267 ‘‘Fountain’’ (Duchamp), 379–380, 384 4.48 Psychosis (Kane), 440, 451 Fox, Josh, 438–439 The Fox (Jonson), 42 France. See French drama Francesca da Rimini (D’Annunzio), 198 Franco, Francisco, 285–286 Franc¸ois I, King of France, 48 Frankenstein, 438, 554 Fraser, Brad, 137 Fraser, Lady Antonia, 476–477 Frayn, Michael, 542 Fredro, Count Aleksander, 220–222 Freedom of the Theaters Act of 1791, 70 Freeman, David, 135, 471–472 Free Southern Theatre (FST), 554–555 French, David, 135 French-Canadian drama, 127, 131, 136, 139 French drama: within America, 423; censorship of, 52, 69, 70; comedie larmoyante, 402–403; court etiquette of Louis XIV, 47; Dada performance in, 386–389; ‘‘e´patez le bourgeois’’ (‘‘shock the bourgeois’’), 448; French Revolution, 242; Italian drama influenced by, 198; medieval mystery plays, 90–91; medieval secular drama, 91; modern drama, 74–75; naturalism,

498; nontraditional theaters within, 555–556; Polish Theater influenced by, 213; realism, 488, 505; surrealism, 511– 512; ‘‘thesis plays,’’ 198 French neoclassical drama, 47–70; aristocratic literary salons, 65; ascendancy of classicism, 47–48; centralization of, 68–70; class imitations within, 53–54; combative art world, 67–68; comedies, 51–52, 54–55, 58, 64, 65, 66–67; fairground troupes, 69; Freedom of The Theaters Act of 1791, 70; influence upon Restoration drama, 96; Italian influence upon, 50– 51; public entertainers, 51–52; Racine, Jean, 61–64, 68, 156, 197; Roman influence upon, 53–54, 65, 69; within Russia, 240; theaters, 48–50; tragedies, 53, 55–56, 58–64; tragicomedies, 56– 58. See also Molie`re (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) Freud, Sigmund, 389, 412, 421, 423–424, 436, 501, 505 Friel, Brian, 184, 185, 311 Friendship in Fashion (Otway), 487 The Friends (Wesker), 499 Friml, Rudolf, 359 Fringe Festivals, 136 Frisch, Max, 159 Frogs (Aristophanes), 16, 17, 18, 19, 62, 415 From Morn to Midnight (Kaiser), 435 From Sunset to Sunrise (Verma), 172 From the Manger to the Cross (film), 317 Frye, Northrop, 392 FST (Free Southern Theatre), 554–555 Fuente Ovejuna (Carpio), 278–279 Fuerst, Otto, 240 Fuhrmann Henschel (Hauptmann), 157 Funny Face (Gershwin), 358 Funny Girl (Styne), 362 The Funnyhouse of a Negro (Kennedy), 297–298, 518 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to The Forum (Sondheim), 362

Index futurists, 382, 384 Futz (Owen), 133 Gaelic performing arts, 177–178, 180. See also Irish drama gags, 195 Gala Theatre, 207 Galczynski, Konstanty, 232 Galdo´s, Benito Pere´z, 283 The Galerie Corray, 383 Galerie Dada, 383 Galileo, 34–35 Galsworthy, John, 498–499 Gambaro, Griselda, 204–205 Gammer Gurton’s Needle (medieval farce), 395 Ganguli, Usha, 171, 173 Garcı´a, Santiago, 205 Garcı´a de la Huerta, Vicente, 281 Garden Theater, 321, 323 Garnier, Robert, 57 Garrard, Jim, 133 Garrick, David, 463, 467, 468 The Gas Heart (Tzara), 388 Gass, Ken, 133 Gas trilogy (Kaiser), 431–432 The Gate Theatre, 184 Gay, John, 158, 357, 360, 419 Gay, Noel, 360 gay drama, 332–347; AIDS crisis addressed by, 341–342, 343, 363, 501; Canadian theater, 132, 136; defined, 332; Indian drama, 175; McNally, 329, 340, 342–344, 476; surrealism, 518– 519; as taboo subject, 332–334; traditional views challenged by, 77, 329; ‘‘transference’’ within, 338–339; turning point for, 339–341; Williams as gay playwright, 334–338 The Gay Science (Nietzsche), 424 Gazdina roba (Preissova´), 144 Ge´linas, Gratien, 127 Gellert, Christian Fu¨rchtegott, 241 gender. See feminist drama; women generation of 1898, 285

Gentle Revolution, 142 The Genuine Sedemunds (Barlach), 434 George II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, 538, 539 George White’s Scandals (White), 359 Georgic (Virgil), 188 German drama, 154–160; cabaret, 380– 384; Dada performance in, 384–386; dramaturgical model, 544; expressionism, 427–430, 435–437; financial support of, 160; liturgical plays, 93; medieval secular drama, 91; naturalism, 491; nontraditional theaters within, 552, 553; postwar Weimar Republic, 385–386; realism, 488 Germans (Kruczkowski), 232 Gerould, Daniel, 228–229 Gershwin, George, 358 Gershwin, Ira, 358 ‘‘Gesamstkunstwerk,’’ 225 Gestos (journal), 207 Ghelderode, Michel de, 514 Ghosts (Ibsen), 263–264, 265, 489–490 The Ghost Sonata (Strindberg), 266, 427, 435 Giacosa, Giuseppe, 198 Gibson, Mel, 88–89, 329 Gielgud, John, 468 Gies, David, 281–282, 283 Gilbert, W.S., 357, 420 Gil studenti (Ariosto), 191 Ginsberg, Allen, 175 Giraldi Cinthio, Giovan Battista, 194 Girard, Antoine, 51 Girl Crazy (Gershwin), 358 Giving Away the Girl (Bhattacharya), 173 Glaspell, Susan, 436, 500 Glassco, Bill, 135 The Glass Menagerie (Williams), 272, 334–335 Glaube Liebe Hoffnung (Horva´th), 498 Glengarry Glen Ross (Mamet), 459–460, 486 The Globe, 549–550

583

584

Index Globe Theatre, Regina, 131, 135 Glover, Vermont, 556–557 Glowacki, Janusz, 237 ‘‘Goat-songs,’’ 12–13 Goat Song (Werfel), 435 ‘‘God on Stage: A Problem in Characterization’’ (Nolan), 324 Gods of the Lightning (Anderson and Nickerson), 500 Godspell (Schwartz), 326, 327, 363 God’s Trombones (Johnson), 296 Goering, Reinhard, 430–431 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 155, 156, 157, 230–231 Gogol, Nikolai, 138, 242, 492–493, 552– 553 Going a Buffalo (Bullins), 299 Gokhale, Shanta, 171, 174 The Golden Windows (Wilson), 517 Goldflam, Arnosˇt, 152 Goldoni, Carlo, 197 Goldsmith, Oliver, 180, 395, 402, 419 Gombrowicz, Witold, 230–231, 236 Go´mez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 202, 282–283 Gonzagas court, 191 Good Friday, 83 Good Friday (Masefield), 318 Goodman, Andrew, 555 Good Night Desdemona (MacDonald), 139 Gorboduc (Norton and Sackville), 37 Gorky, Maxim, 496–497, 501, 505 Gorostiza, Carlos, 204 Gort, Ireland, 182 Gosson, Stephen, 38 Go¨tz von Berlichingen (Goethe), 155 Gougenot, N., 54–55 Gounaud, Charles, 463–464, 467 Governor General’s Award in Drama, 136 Gozzi, Count Carlo, 197, 393 Grabowski, Artur, 237 Granada, 275 Granny Maumee (Torrence), 321, 322, 326 Granowsky, Alexis, 373

Granville-Barker, Harley, 73, 539 Gray, John, 134 Grazzini, Anton Francesco, 194 Grease (Jacobs and Casey), 361, 470 ‘‘The Greatest Drama Ever Staged’’ (Sayers), 329–330 The Great God Brown (O’Neill), 436 Greek drama, 1–19; actors of, 532; comedies, 23, 190–191, 415; definitions and origins of, 5–8; dramaturgical issues within, 543–544; farce, 407; influence on French Neoclassical drama, 53–54, 69; influence on German drama, 156, 157; influence on Indian drama, 166; influence on Italian drama, 196–197; influence on Polish Theater, 225–226; performance of, 8–12, 17, 366, 373, 547–548; revivals of, 18, 556; role of ritual within, 9, 13; Roman drama influenced by, 18, 19–20, 23–24, 26–27; Roman drama vs., 81–82; satyrdramas, 5–6, 9, 12–15, 415; Shakespeare’s comedies based on, 418; tragedies, 5–6, 7–8, 9, 10, 12–15, 521, 522; violent plots within, 5, 14–15. See also classical drama Green, Adolph, 362 Green, Paul, 271, 366–368, 372–374, 375, 500 The Green Bay Tree (Shairp), 334 Greenberg, Noah, 94 n.1 Greenberg, Richard, 347 Green Pastures (Connelly), 321, 323–326 Greenspan, David, 518–519 Green Thumb, 136 Greenwood, Jane, 536 Greer, Margaret, 278 Gregory, Johann, 239 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 180–181, 182, 183 Grein, J.T., 538 Greville Press, 476 Gre´vin, Jacques, 54 Griboedov, Aleksandr, 242 Griffiths, Linda, 134 Grillparzer, Franz, 156, 157

Index Grimaldi, Juan de, 281–282 Griots, 292 Grochowiak, Stanislaw, 232 Grosses Schauspielhouse, 553 Grossman, Jan, 150 Grosz, George, 381, 383–384, 385–386 grotesque, 233, 235–236, 285, 427–428, 449. See also expressionism Grotowski, Jerzy, 210, 217, 553–554 Group Theatre troupes, New York, 271, 544 Grun, Bernard, 530 Gryphius, Andreas, 154 Guarini, Giovanni Battista, 57 Guarino, Battista, 195 The Guerillas (McCabe), 270–271 Gue´rin, Robert, 51 Gue´ru, Hugues, 51 Guettel, Adam, 364 Guild of St. George, 178 Guinness, Alec, 130 Gupta, Tanika, 169, 171–173, 175 Guru (Tagore), 169 Gussow, Mel, 459, 477 Gustav Adolf (Strindberg), 266 Gustav III (Strindberg), 266 Gustavus Vasa (Strindberg), 266 Guthrie, Tyrone, 130 Guthrie Theater, 552 Guys and Dolls (Loesser), 361, 362 Gypsy (Styne and Sondheim), 362 Habsburg dynasty, 143, 277, 280 Hair (Rado, Ragni, and MacDermot), 361 Hairspray (Shaiman and Wittman), 364 The Hairy Ape (O’Neill), 75, 77, 436 Halac, Ricardo, 204 Halifax, Canada, 139 Hamilton, William, 327 Hamlet (Shakespeare): interest in state affairs within, 41; life force behind characters, 392, 406; mystery plays alluded to within, 93; on new science, 35; Polish theater influenced by, 216– 217, 230–231; Romeo and Juliet vs.,

464; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Stoppard) based on, 411; The Spanish Tragedy as precursor to, 38; Sumarokov’s neoclassical version of, 240 Hamlisch, Marvin, 361 Hammerstein, Oscar, 358, 359, 360, 362, 367, 437 Handke, Peter, 159–160 Hansberry, Lorraine, 296–297, 501 Hapgood, Emilie, 321 Hapgood, Robert, 462 Happy Days (Beckett), 411 Harburg, E.Y. ‘‘Yip,’’ 360 Hardy, Thomas, 466 Hare, David, 73–74 Harkins, William, 146 ‘‘Harlem’’ (Hughes), 297 Harlem Renaissance, 295–297 Harnick, Sheldon, 361 Harrigan, Edward, 357 Harris, Jule, 467 Harrison, Richard B., 323, 325 Harrison, Tony, 94, 329 Harrison, William, 34 Hart, Lorenz, 358–359, 360 Hart, Moss, 422, 437 Hart, Tony, 357 Hart House Theatre, 128, 129 Hasˇek, Jaroslav, 148, 150 Hasenclever, Walter, 430, 433–434, 435 Hatch, James V., 295 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 157, 160, 491, 499 Hausmann, Raoul, 384, 386 Havel, Va´clav, 142, 150–152 Hawthorn, Pamela, 134 Hayavadana (Karnad), 163, 165 Hayler, Duncan, 465–466 Haynes, Elizabeth Sterling, 136 He and She (Crothers), 500 Heartfield, John, 384 Hebbel, Friedrich, 157 Hecht, Ben, 385 Hecyra (Terence), 26, 393, 408 Hedda Gabler (Ibsen), 71, 72, 264–265

585

586

Index He´delin, Franc¸ois, 60–61 Heidegger, Martin, 421–422 Hellenistic period, 548. See also Greek drama Hellman, Lillian, 272, 500–501 Hello, Dolly! (Herman), 361, 362, 537 Hendry, Tom, 135 ‘‘He Never Expected Much’’ (Hardy), 466 Henley, Beth, 274 Hennings, Betty, 262 Hennings, Emmy, 380–382, 383 Henry III, King of France, 50 Henry IV, Part 1 (Shakespeare), 556 Henry VIII, King of England, 316 Henry V (Shakespeare), 93, 396 Heracles, 11–12 Herbert, John, 128, 132, 357–358 Herbert, Zbigniew, 233 Hercules, 27 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 143 Herman, Jerry, 361 Hermann, Maurice, 534 Hermann-Neisse, Max, 383 Herodes und Marianne (Hebbel), 157 Herodotus, 7 Herod the King (Munk), 266 Heroic drama, 98–104, 105–111 Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti (Brecht), 158–159 He That Should Come (Sayer), 319–320 Heyward, DuBose, 358 Heywood, Thomas, 40 Hiberno-English dialects, 182, 183 high comedy, 283 High Performance Rodeo, 139 Highway, Tomson, 137, 139 Hilar, Karel Hugo, 148 Hilferty, Susan, 536 Hill, Philip, 369, 370 The HIll Cumorah Pageant (Palmyra, New York), 328 Him (Cummings), 514, 519 Hinduism, 168–169 Hippias, 8 Hippolytus (Euripides), 63

His Little Girl (Karpowicz), 235 Hispanic Theater within the United States, 207 Historias para ser contadas (Dragu´n), 204 HIV. See AIDS crisis H.M.S. Pinafore (Gilbert and Sullivan), 357, 420 Hobson’s Choice (Gupta), 169, 172–173 Ho¨ch, Hannah, 384 Hodgson, John, 328 Hodina mezi psem a vlkem (Fischerova´), 151–152 Hoffman, William, 341 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 158 Holden, Stephen, 307–308 ‘‘holiday humor,’’ 405–406 Holst, Gustav, 318 Holy Family Church, 327–328 The Homecoming (Pinter), 411, 480 Homer, 7, 19 Homiman, Annie, 180, 183 ‘‘Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises’’ (Kauffmann), 339 homosexuality. See gay drama Honegger, Arthur, 510 Hopkins, Pauline, 295 Hopwood, Avery, 333 Horace, 20, 53, 54, 56, 57 Horace (Corneille), 60 Horn in The West (Selden), 374 ¨ do¨n von, 433, 497–498 Horva´th, O Hotel Beautiful Roses (Foreman), 519 Hoˆtel de Bourgogne, 49–50, 51, 54, 62, 68 Hotel Fuck (Foreman), 519 The Hotel in Amsterdam (Osborne), 499 Hould-Ward, Ann, 536 Howard, Henry, Earl of Surrey, 37 Howard, Leslie, 468 Howard, Robert, 105 How I Learned to Drive (Vogel), 352–353, 355 How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (Loesser), 361, 362 Hrothsvita of Gandersheim, 83 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 382, 383, 385

Index Hughes, Langston, 273, 295–296, 297, 321, 326 Hugnet, Georges, 388 Humanism: catastrophic theater vs., 449– 450; during English Renaissance, 32, 35; within Italian tragedies, 194; Polish Theater, 210–211, 220; within Roman comedy, 26; of Shakespeare, 41; studia humanitatis, 189–190 Humor. See comedies The Hungry Ones (Currimbhoy), 175 Hunter, Kermit, 371, 372, 375 Hunter, N.C., 499 Hunting Cockroaches (Glowacki), 237 Hunting The Sun (Dutt), 171, 172 Hurston, Zora Neale, 273 Husband and Wife (Fredro), 221 Hussey, Olivia, 469 Hussites, 143, 145 The Hyacinth Macaw (Wellman), 518 Hyde, Douglas, 180 Hymn to the Rising Sun (Green), 500 Hypokrites, 6, 11 Ianua linguarum reserata (Komensky), 143 Iaroslavl, Russia, 240 Ibsen, Henrik: A Doll’s House, 71, 181, 259–263, 265, 456, 489, 504; as ‘‘father of Modern drama,’’ 76; Ghosts, 263– 264; influence on American dramatic realism, 500–501; life and career of, 71– 72, 257–258; Naturalism of, 157; Polish Theater resembling, 220; realism of, 489–490; rejection of by Artaud, 448; Royal Theatre studies, 257; Yeats on, 181 Ibsen Festival, 267 I Capuleti ed i Montecchi (Bellini), 463 ICTUS, 205 IDEA (International Dialects of English Archive), 560 An Ideal Husband (Wilde), 420 Iffland, August Wilhelm, 160 I Gelosi, 50, 51

Il berretto a sonagli (Pirandello), 199 Il candelaio (Bruno), 193 ‘‘Il Lasca’’ (Grazzini), 194 Illica, Luigi, 198 Il negromante (Ariosto), 191 Il Re Torrismondo (Tasso), 194 ‘‘Il Ruzante’’ (Beolco), 195 Il trovatore (Cammarano), 198 imabic pentameter, 156 iImage-based physical Theater, 138 imagination as acting tool, 530–531 Imperial Theatre of London, 318 Imperial Theatre School of Russia, 240 The Importance of Being Earnest (Wilde), 72–73, 401, 412, 420 impressionist artists, 425–426 Independent Theatre, London, 505, 538 Indian drama, 161–176; background, 161–162; colonial issues, 166–167; political issues, 167–168; regional issues, 167; religious issues, 168–171; social issues, 167, 169–172, 175; styles and themes, 162–165; urban issues, 162, 172, 174–175; women as characters, 172–174 The Indian Prophecy (Custis), 269 indigenous drama, Canada, 127, 132, 134, 136, 139 indigenous drama, Latin America, 201 indigenous drama, U.S., 423 indirect satire, 416 Industrial Revolution, 71 Inferno (Dante), 198 Inferno (Strindberg), 266 Inge, William, 338, 339 Inheritors (Glaspell), 500 In Abraham’s Bosom (Green), 271 In a Little House (Rittner), 227 In A Small Country House (Witkacy), 229–230 In Celebration (Storey), 499 In the Net (Kisielewski), 222 In White America (Duberman), 555 ‘‘In Yer Face’’ theater, 440–451; the collapse of language, 446–447; ‘‘New

587

588

Index Brutalists,’’ 450; theater of disintegration, 441–444; violence, necessity of, 440–441, 444–447; the wages of sin, 444–445 Innocent III, Pope, 315 Inquilab (Currimbhoy), 168 Inside Out (Gupta), 172 The Inspector General (Gogol), 242, 492– 493, 552–553 Institute of Outdoor Drama, 372 INTAR, 207 The Interlude of Youth, 318 Interlude (or play) about the clerk and the maiden, 91 International WOW Company, 438–439 Interregnum period, 96, 98, 123 Intima Teatern, 266 ‘‘An Introduction for My Plays’’ (Yeats), 181 In-Yer-Face Theatre (Sierz), 450 Ionesco, Euge`ne, 411, 486, 515–516 Iphigeneia at Aulis (Euripides), 556 Iphigenie auf Tauris (Goethe), 155, 156 Iphige´nie en Aulide (Racine), 63 Iredynski, Ireneusz, 233 Irish Abbey Theatre, 128, 130 Irish drama, 177–186; dialect of, 182; early history of, 177–180; McPherson, 302–306, 312; modern drama, 74, 76, 77, 180–186; Yeats, 30, 180–184, 312, 317, 387, 471 Irish Literary Theatre, 180 Irish National Theatre Society, 180 Irving, Henry, 464, 465, 468 Isaacs, Edith J.R., 323 I simillimi (Trissino), 193 Islam, 168 I suppositi (Ariosto), 191 Italian drama, 187–200; within America, 423; futurism, 382, 384; influence on French Neoclassical drama, 49, 50–51; liturgical plays, 91, 93; Renaissance, 32, 189–196, 416–417, 550–551. See also Roman drama Ivanov (Chekhov), 245, 246

Ivone, Princess of Burgundy (Gombrowicz), 230 Izquierdo, Martin, 537 Jacobean drama, 33, 42, 316, 487 Jacobs, Jim, 361 Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well (Brel), 362 Jacques le fataliste et son maıˆtre (Diderot), 151 Jahnn, Hans Henny, 432–433 Jakub a jeho pa´n (Kundera), 151 James, Henry, 247, 488 James, Toni-Leslie, 536 James I, King of England, 33, 46, 316. See also Jacobean drama James II, King of England, 95, 96, 121 Jana´cˇek, Leosˇ, 144 Janco, Marcel, 382, 383 Jan Hus (Jira´sek), 145 Jansenism doctrine, 61 Janulka, Daughter of Fidezko (Witkacy), 513–514 Janus sacerdos (Panormita), 190 Jan Zˇiizˇka (Jira´sek), 145 Japanese Noh drama, 182 Jarry, Alfred, 387, 408 J.B. (MacLeish), 326 Jedermann (Hofmannsthal), 158 Jedermann (Reinhardt), 553 Jeffrey (Rudnick), 344 Jejı´ pastorkyneˇ (Preissova´), 144 Jenkin, Len, 518 Jenufa (Jana´cek), 144 Jeslka, 212 the Jessie awards, 136 Jessner, Leopold (Jessnertreppen), 434 Jesters, 143, 195–196 Jesus Christ, 209–210. See also eucharistic plays; passion plays; religion and religious drama Jesus Christ Superstar (Rice and Webber), 326–327, 363, 470 The Jeweller’s Shop (Wojtyla), 233 The Jew of Malta (Marlowe), 40

Index Jim Dandy, Fat Man in a Famine (Saroyan), 515 Jira´sek, Alois, 145 Jodelle, Etienne, 53, 54 Joel, Billy, 363 Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (Wilson), 300 John Bull’s OTher Island (Shaw), 180 John Housman Studio Theatre, 462 Johnson, Hall, 323 Johnson, James Weldon, 296, 322, 323, 325 Johnson, Samuel, 112 Johst, Hanns, 433 Jokes and Their Relation to The Unconscious (Freud), 423–424 Jonas, Susan, 544 Jones, Inigo, 45–46 Jones, Leroi (Amiri Baraka), 298, 300–301, 339 Jones, Robert Edmond, 321, 323, 535 Jones, Tom, 361 Jonson, Ben, 39, 41–42, 45–46, 398–399, 418 Jordan, Neil, 303 Joseph and His Brethren (Parker), 317 Journeys Among the Dead (Ionesco), 516 The Journey to Jerusalem (Anderson), 326 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor, 281 Joyce, James, 257 Juan Jose´ (Dicenta), 283–284 Juan Moreira (Podesta´), 202 Juda of Carioth (Rostworowski), 226–227 Judges (Wyspianski), 223 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 165 Jung, Carl, 421, 436 Jungle Book (Disney), 454 Juno and The Paycock (O’Casey), 183 Jupiter Optimus Maximus, 19 Just Between Ourselves (Ayckbourn), 500 Just Say No. A Play about a Farce (Kramer), 342 Kabale und Liebe (Schiller), 155 Kafka, Franz, 146, 150, 234, 493 Kaiser, Georg, 430, 431–432, 433, 435

Kajzar, Helmut, 233 Kamala (Tendulkar), 169 Kambar, Chandrasekhar, 163, 165 Kamla (Tendulkar), 173 Kammerspiele Theater, Munich, 381 Kander, John, 342, 361–362 Kane, Sarah, 438, 440–448, 450–451 Kantor, Tadeusz, 226, 230 Kared, Urjo, 135 Karlinsky, Simon, 251 Karnad, Girish, 163, 165, 170–171 Karpowicz, Tymoteusz, 234–235 Kasimir und Karoline (Horva´th), 498 Kasˇpa´rek (jester), 143 Kaspar (Handke), 159–160 Kathleen Ni Houlihan (Gregory and Yeats), 181 Kauffmann, Stanley, 339 Kaufman, George S., 422, 436–437 Kawartha Summer Festival, 135 Kazin, Alfred, 332 ‘‘Kde domov mu˚j?’’ (Czech national anthem), 144 Keaton, Buster, 408 Keller, Joe, 77 Kemble, Fanny, 468 Kemp, Edward, 329 Kennedy, Adrienne, 297–298, 518 Kennedy, Dona, 306 Kennedy’s Children (Patrick), 340 Kerala theater, 161, 164 Kerechinsky’s Wedding (SukhovoKobylin), 493 Kern, Jerome, 358, 359 Kidd, Michael, 362 Kilkenny, Dublin, 178 Killigrew, Thomas, 97 Kilroy, Tom, 184–185 Kiltartanese, 182 Kim, Willa, 536 Kimball, Stanley, 143 Kinch, Martin, 133, 135 King, Martin Luther, 483 The King and I (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 360

589

590

Index A King and No King (Beaumont and Fletcher), 44 King Lear (Shakespeare), 41, 93, 396, 442, 446, 451 The King of Spain (Wilson), 517 King’s Company, 66, 97 Kingsley, Sidney, 485 Kirchner, Ernst, 428 Kirkegaard, Soren, 421–422 Kisielewski, Jan August, 222 Kismet (Wright and Forrest), 361, 362 Kiss Me, Kate (Porter), 359 Kiss of the Spider Woman, 342–343 kitchen sink drama, 452–453 The Kitchen (Wesker), 485 Kleban, Edward, 361 Kleist, Heinrich von, 156 Klicpera, Va´clav Kliment, 144 Klotz, Florence, 536 Kniazhnin, Iakov, 241, 242 Knipper, Olga, 245 Koch, Frederick, 366, 373 Kochanowski, Jan, 210–211, 220 Kocˇka na kolejı´ch (Topol), 149 Kodiak Island, Alaska, 367 Kohout, Pavel, 151 Kokoschka, Oskar, 428–429 Kolve, V.A., 315 Komensky, Jan A´mos (Comenius), 143 Komoidia, 16. See also comedies Komos, 7, 9 Konec masopustu (Topol), 149 Ko¨nig Ottokars Glu¨ck und Ende (Grillparzer), 157 Kordian (Slowacki), 216–218 Kott, Jan, 235 Kotzebue, August, 160 Kovaleva, Praskovia, 242 Krakus (Norwid), 219–220 Kramer, Larry, 341–342, 501 Krasinski, Zygmunt, 218–219, 229, 230– 231, 236 Kroll, Jack, 459 Kruczkowski, Leon, 232 Kundera, Milan, 149, 151

Kunst, Johann, 240 Kushner, Tony, 332–333, 344–347 Kuskovo Theater, 242 Kyd, Thomas, 38–39 Kyle, Barry, 467 La Betı´a (Beolco), 195 La bottega del caffe` (Goldoni), 197 LaBute, Neil, 306–308, 312 La Cage aux Folles (Fierstein), 340–341 La Cage aux Folles (Herman), 361 La Calandria (Bibbiena and Castiglione), 192 La Candelaria, 205 La casa de Bernarda Alba (Lorca), 285 La cassaria (Ariosto), 191 LaChiusa, Michael John, 364 Lachnit, Ewa, 237 La comedia nueva o El cafe´ (Moratı´n), 281 La Come´die des come´diens (Gougenot), 54–55, 70 La conjuracio´n de Venecia (Martı´nez de la Rosa), 282 La cortigiana (Aretino), 193 La Courtisane (Gougenot), 54–55 La Critique de l’E´cole des femmes (Molie`re), 67 La Deffense et illustration de la langue franc¸oyse (du Bellay), 53 La Dispute (Marivaux), 402–403 Lady, Be Good (Gershwin), 358 Lady Frederick (Maugham), 498 Lady in the Dark (Weill), 360 The Lady of the Camelias (Dumas), 340, 488 Lady Windermere’s Fan (Wilde), 420 La figlia di Iorio (D’Annunzio), 198 L’Age d’Or (The´aˆtre du Soleil), 555 Lagerkvist, Pa¨r, 266 Lahr, John, 306, 307 Laing, R.D., 447 La Jolla Playhouse, 541 Lalek (Herbert), 233 La Lena (Ariosto), 191 La locandiera (Goldoni), 197

Index La Lupa (Verga), 199 La mandragola (Machiavelli), 192 La maschera e il volto (Chiarelli), 199 L’amore delle tre melarance (Gozzi), 197 La Moscheta (Beolco), 195 L’Amour cache´ par l’Amour, 55 Lande´, Jean-Baptiste, 240 Landgartha (Burnell), 179 Lane, Burton, 360 Lane, Nathan, 364 Langer, Frantisˇek, 147 Langer, Susan, 392–393, 395 Langham, Michel, 467 Language in Play: of absurdist drama, 454–456; actor’s sensitivity to, 528–530; of talk drama, 456, 457–460 La noche de los asesinos (Triana), 204 La pastoral (Beolco), 195 La pata de cabra (Grimaldi), 281–282 La poe´tica (Luza´n), 280 La Poe´tique d’Aristote, traduite du grec (de Norville), 54 La Poe´tique d’Aristote (Dacier), 54, 69 La Pratique du the´aˆtre (He´delin), 61 La Reine d’E´cosse (Montchrestien), 56 Largo Desolato (Havel), 151–152 Larins Sahib (Das), 166 Larson, Jonathan, 364, 470 L’Art Poe´tique (Boileau-Despre´aux), 69 La secreta obscenidad de cada dı´a (Parra), 206 La Seinte resurreccion, 85 ˇ apek and C ˇ apek), 145 La´sky hra osudna´ (C Last Call! (Panych), 134 The Last Mile (Wexley), 500 Last Supper, 277, 314–316. See also religion and religious drama La Taille, Jean de, 54, 56 Laterna Magika (Radok), 149 Latin American drama, 201–208 Latin American Theatre Review (journal), 207 La Tre´sorie`re (Grevin), 54 Lauds, 188 L’augellin belverde (Gozzi), 197

Laurents, Arthur, 464 Lautre´amont, Comte de, 507, 517 L’Avare (Molie`re), 66 La vedova scaltra (Goldoni), 197 La vida es suen˜o (Caldero´n), 279 The Law of Remains (Abdoh), 438 Lazzi, 195, 197, 407 Lear (Bond), 438 Leave It to Jane (Kern), 358 Leave It to Me (Porter), 359 Leaving Home (French), 135 Le Barbier de Se´ville (Beaumarchais), 70 Lebel, Jean-Jacques, 448 Leben des Gaililei (Brecht), 159 Le Bossu, Rene´, 69 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Molie`re), 66, 396 Le Cid (Corneille), 50, 59, 60, 67 L’E´cole des femmes (Molie`re), 67 Le Conte, Valleran, 52, 53 LeCoque, Jacque, 531 Le Garcon et l’Aveugle, 91 Legends (Strindberg), 266 Le´ger, Fernand, 389 Legrand, Henri, 51 Lehar, Franz, 357 Leigh, Carolyn, 362 Leigh, Mike, 500 Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (Marivaux), 403 LeMaire, Charles, 536 Le Malade imaginaire (Molie`re), 66, 68, 418 Le Mariage de Figaro (Beaumarchais), 70 Le maschere (Machiavelli), 192 Le Menteur (Corneille), 64 Le Misanthrope (Molie`re), 66, 418 Lenaia, 8 Lenz, Jakob Michael, 155, 156 Lenz, J.M.R., 488 Leonarda (Bjørnson), 259 Leonce und Lena (Bu¨chner), 156–157 Lepage, Robert, 138 Lerner, Alan Jay, 360 Les Atrides (The´aˆtre du Soleil), 556

591

592

Index Les Belles-Soeurs (Tremblay), 129, 132 Lescarbot, Marc, 127 Les Come´diens du Roi, 49 Les Corrivaux (la Taille), 54 Les de´vots, 67 Les Esbahis (Grevin), 54 Les Femmes savantes (Molie`re), 66 Lesmian, Boleslaw, 232 Les Mise`rables (Boublil and Scho¨nberg), 137, 363 Les Plaideurs (Racine), 64 Les Pre´cieuses ridiciules (Molie`re), 65 L’Esprit fort (Claveret), 54 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 154–155, 156, 160, 488, 522–523 The Lesson (Ionesco), 411 Le Tartuffe (Molie`re), 66, 67–68 Le the´aˆtre dans le the´aˆtre, 54–55 Le The´aˆtre de Neptune en la NouvelleFrance (Lescarbot), 127 Libation Bearers (Aeschylus), 15 Liberated Theater of Czechoslovakia, 147, 150 Licho, Adolf, 433 Lieber, Jerry, 363 The Life and Work of Harold Pinter (Billington), 477 Life of Joseph (Rej), 210 Lights Out (Padmanabhan), 174 Like I Say (Jenkin), 518 Lilla Weneda (Slowacki), 217 L’Illusion comique (Corneille), 58–59, 60 L’Illustre The´aˆtre, 50, 65 Lily Dale (Foote), 309 Linklater, Kristin, 529 Liola` (Pirandello), 199 The Lion King (Disney), 364 Lips TogeTher, Teeth Apart (McNally), 343 The Lisbon Traviata (McNally), 342 literary Dada, 385–386. See also Dada and Dadaists Littell, Robert, 323 Litte´rature (magazine), 387 The Little Foxes (Hellman), 272 The Little Green Balloon cabaret, 223

Little Ham (Hughes), 295, 296 Little Johnny Jones (Cohan), 358 A Little Night Music (Sondheim), 362 Little Shop of Horrors (Menken), 364 Little Theatre movement, 128–129 The Little Theatre of Green Goose (Galczynsk), 232 Littlewood, Joan, 133 liturgical plays. See religion and religious drama Livent Inc., 137–138 Living Theatre, 437 The Living Theatre, 554 Loas, 280 Local Initiatives Programs (LIP), 134 Locke, John, 102 Loesser, Frank, 361 Loewe, Frederick, 360 Lohenstein, Daniel Caspar von, 154 Lolio, Alberto, 195 Lomonosov, Mikhail, 241 London, England, 33–34, 42–43, 104, 105, 178–179 London Pinter Festival 2000, 476 The Lone Tusker (Panikkar), 163 Long, William Ivey, 536 A Long Day’s Journey Into Night (O’Neill), 76, 501, 502 Look Back in Anger (Osborne), 73–74, 184, 499 Lopez, Robert, 364 Lo´pez de Ayala, Adelardo, 283 Loquasto, Santo, 537 Lorca, Federico Garcı´a, 285 Lord Chamberlain of England, 317, 318, 320, 325, 419 Lord Halewyn (Ghelderode), 514 Los soles truncos (Marque´s), 204 The Lost Colony (Green), 271, 366–367, 370–371, 372, 373 Louis XIV, King, 47, 51, 61–62, 66, 68, 211 Louvre, 49 Love and Anger (Walker), 137 Løveid, Cecilie, 267 Love in the Crimea (Mrozek), 236–237

Index The Love of the Three Oranges (Gozzi), 393 The Lover (Pinter), 477 Love’s Old Sweet Song (Saroyan), 515 Love! Valour! Compassion! (McNally), 343 The Lower Depths (Gorky), 496, 505 Luces de bohemia (Valle-Incla´n), 285 Lucrezia (Delfino), 196 Ludi Romani, 19, 21 Ludlam, Charles, 340, 341 Ludus Coventriae (N-Town Cycle), 86, 92, 316, 318, 416 Luhrmann, Baz, 462, 465, 467, 469 Lukosz, Jerzy, 237 Lulu (Wedekind), 428 Luscombe, George, 133–134 Luther, Martin, 93 Luza´n, Ignacio de, 280–281 Lyceum Theater, 329 Lycurgus, 17 Lysistrata (Aristophanes), 16, 18, 398, 407 MacAnna, Tomas, 185 Macbeth (Piave), 198 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 41, 165, 387, 434, 442, 522 MacDermot, Galt, 361 MacDonald, Ann-Marie, 139 Macedonia, Greece, 6 Ma´cha, Karel Hynek, 148 Machiavelli, Niccolo`, 192 Machinal (Treadwell), 436 ‘‘Machine play,’’ 57 Macintosh, Cameron, 363 MacIvor, Daniel, 138, 139 MacKaye, Percy, 321 ‘‘Mackie Messer’’ (Brecht and Weill), 158 MacLeish, Archibald, 326 The Madame MacAdam Travelling Theatre (Kilroy), 184–185 Mad Dog Blues (Shepard), 518 The Madman and the Nun (Witkacy), 229– 230 Madrid, Francisco de, 276 Madrid, Spain, 278, 286 Maggie & Pierre (Griffiths), 134

Magna Graecia, 19 Magritte, Rene´, 516 Magruder, James, 541, 544 Mahapoor (Alekar), 169 Maharashtra, India, 167 Mahelot, Laurent, 49 Maiden Vows or Magnetism of the Heart (Fredro), 221 Maintenon, Mme de, 68 Mairet, Jean, 57–58 Majitele´ klı´cˇu˚ (Kundera), 149 Major Barbara (Shaw), 419–420 Malina, Judith, 554 Mame (Herman), 361 Mamet, David, 304, 459–460, 486 Man and Superman (Shaw), 404 Man and the Masses (Toller), 432, 434, 435 The Man Born to Be King (Sayer), 319, 320 Manhattan Theatre Club, 344 Manitoba Theatre Centre (MTC), 131, 132 Manizales festival, 205 Mankind (morality play), 36, 92, 93 Man Ray, 387–388, 389 Manrique, Go´mez, 276 Mans, Jacques Peletier du, 53 Mansfield Theater, New York, 323, 325 A Man’s World (Crothers), 500 Mantovano, Publio Filippo, 191 Mantua court, 195 Manutius, Aldus, 194 The Man Who Came to Dinner (Kauffman and Hart), 422 The Man Who Ran (Disney, Oklahoma), 328 Manzoni, Alessandro, 198 Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Wilson), 300 ‘‘Maraschino’’ (LaBute), 307 Marathi playwrights, 167, 168, 169, 170, 174 Marat/Sade (Weiss), 448 Marchbanks, Samuel, 130 The March on Russia (Storey), 499

593

594

Index Marcuse, Herbert, 447 Mareech, The Legend (Mukherjee), 163, 165 Marek, Jaroslaw, 232 Margulies, Donald, 542 Mariage Blanc (Rozewicz), 234 Maria Magdalena (Hebbel), 157 Maria Stuart (Schiller), 156 Marinetti, F.T., 382 marionette shows, 138 marital farce, 408–409. See also farce Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de, 402–403 Marlowe, Christopher, 38, 39–40, 92–93 Marlowe, Julia, 468 Marque´s, Rene´, 204 The Marriage (Gombrowicz), 230–231, 236 The Marriage of Figaro (Beaumarchais), 393 Married (Strindberg), 265 Martes de carnaval (Valle-Incla´n), 285 Martin, Karl-Heinz, 429–430 Martı´nez de la Rosa, Francisco, 282 Martinu˚, Bohuslav, 144 Marx, Eleanor, 262 Marx, Jeff, 364 Marxism, 76, 158, 167, 220, 505, 539 Mary, Princess of Orange, 96, 121 Mary Magdalene, Saint, 86, 92 Mary Poppins (Disney), 364 Marysˇa (Alois and Vile´m Mrsˇtik), 144–145 Mascagni, Pietro, 199 Masefield, John, 318–319, 321 the masque, 45–46 the Masque awards, 136 The Masque of Blackness, 45–46 Masquerade Hall, 143 Massey, Vincent, 128, 131 Massine, Leonid, 508 Master Olof (Strindberg), 265 Masticˇka´rˇ (Ungentarius), 142 Mateo (Disce´polo), 203 Matera, Barbara, 537

ˇ apek), 146–147 Matka (C Maugham, W. Somerset, 498 May Day, 178 ‘‘May’’ (Ma´cha), 148 Maze hunger strikes, 185 McCabe, James Dabney, 270–271 ‘‘McDonald-ization’’ of The U.S. South, 274 McGrath, John, 421 McKendrick, Melveena, 278, 279 McKenna, Siobhan, 185 McNally, Terrence, 329, 340, 342–344, 476 McPherson, Conor, 302–306, 312 Me and My Girl (Gay), 360 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 417 the Mecca awards, 136 Mechane, 11 Medea (Euripides), 10 Medea (Jahnn), 433 Medici family, 188, 192 medieval drama, 81–94; dramatic comedy, 395, 407, 416; influence on later drama, 36, 92–94, 232, 320, 324–325; Italian drama, 187–189; liturgical plays, 314– 316; morality plays, 91–93; mystery plays, 86–91, 93, 223, 320, 324–325, 328–329, 549; secular drama, 91; set design, 49; of Spain, 275–277, 286; theaters and playhouses of, 549; vernacular drama, 85–86 The Medieval Theatre in the Round (Southern), 328 megamusicals, 137–138, 363. See also music and dance; specific musicals by name Mehring, Walter, 385 Meleager (Wyspianski), 223 Mellon Foundation, 541 Melodrama, defined, 419 Menaechmi (Plautus), 28, 193, 396 Menander, 17–18, 20, 23, 400 Men in White (Kingsley), 485 Menken, Alan, 364 The Merchant of Yonkers (Wilder), 157

Index Merchant, Vivian, 476, 477 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 41, 417 The Merchant (Rej), 210 Mercy Seat (LaBute), 307, 308 Meredith, George, 399, 400, 410 The Merry Widow (Lehar), 357 The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare), 40 ‘‘Merz’’ (Schwitters), 386 Metamorphoses X (Ovid), 188 Metastasio, Pietro, 197–198 Metatheaters, 39 ‘‘Metatheatrical dramaturgy,’’ 230 method acting, 530. See also actors and acting styles Methodist church, 308 Mexican American theater, 207 Mexico, 201–202, 203, 204, 206. See also Latin American drama Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 147, 552–553 Michaelangelo’s Models (Patrick), 340 Michael from Wilkowiecko, 209–210 Micinski, Tadeusz, 226 Mickiewicz, Adam, 214–216, 217, 221, 222, 225, 230–231 Middle ages. See medieval drama Middle Comedy, 17 Middletom, Thomas, 42–43 Midsummer Day plays, 178 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 41, 393, 394, 395, 397, 404, 417 Mielziner, Jo, 535 The Mikado (Gilbert and Sullivan), 420 Mikhailovich, Tsar Alexei, 239 Miles Gloriosus (Plautus), 395, 398 Milhaud, Darius, 509–510 Millennium Approaches (Kushner), 344, 345–346, 347 Miller, Arthur: The Crucible, 501; expressionist devices of, 437; homosexuality addressed by, 339; language in play, 76, 456, 457, 459– 460; Loman as ‘‘tragic’’ character, 521–

522; on ‘‘wages of sin,’’ 444; play construction of, 455; realism of, 77 Miller, May, 326 The Miller as Sorceror, Deceiver, and Matchmaker (Ablesimov), 241 Miller’s Tale (Chaucer), 87 miming, 20–21, 23, 178 Minna von Barnhelm (Lessing), 154, 522 The Minor (Fonvizin), 241 minstrel shows, 269–270, 294–295, 299 Minto, Dorothy, 468 miracle plays, 86, 178, 315–316. See also mystery plays Mira (Das), 163, 173 A Mirror for Magistrates, 37 ‘‘mirror theater,’’ 231 The Mirror-Wardrobe One Fine Evening (Aragon), 511–512, 513 Mirvish, Ed and David, 137 The Misanthrope (Molie`re), 399 The Miser (Molie`re), 492 Misfortune from a Coach (Kniazhnin), 241 Miss Julie (Strindberg), 265, 426, 492, 505 Miss Saigon (Boublil and Scho¨nberg), 137, 363 Mister Bones (Toronto Workshop Productions), 133 Mitchell, Betty, 136 Mitchell, Katie, 329 Mitchell, Ken, 135 Mitchell, W.O., 135 Mithridate (Racine), 63 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 555–556 Mockumentaries, 109 Modern American Drama (Bigsby), 302 Modern Nativity Play (Iredynski), 233 Moir, Duncan, 278 Moiseiwitsch, Guthrie and Tanya, 131 Molie`re (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 64–68, 418; actors of, 531; Catherine the Great influenced by, 241; character definition by, 396, 492; ‘‘holiday humor’’ within, 406; physical humor within farces, 407– 408; as satirist, 398, 399, 400; Wilbur translations of, 529

595

596

Index Molina, Tirso de, 279, 280, 282 Moll Cut-Purse (Dekker and Middleton), 43 Monck, Nugent, 318 The Monkey Dance (Bhattacharya), 173 Monster (MacIvor), 139 Monstrous Regiment, 421 Montchrestien, Antoine de, 56 Montdory, 55, 59 Monteverdi, Claudio, 197 A Month in the Country (Turgenev), 494– 495 Montreal’s Expo ‘67, 127–128 Montreal Theater, 136, 139 Monty Python’s Spamalot, 364 Monveil, J.-M.B. de, 463 Moonlight (Pinter), 477 Moonshine (Wilson), 516 Moore, Dora Mavor, 130, 136 Morality plays, 36–37, 41, 46, 86, 91–93, 210, 232. See also religion and religious drama Morante, Luis Ambrosio, 202 Moratı´n, Leandro Ferna´ndez de, 281 More, Thomas, 32 Mormon faith, 306, 328 The Mormon Miracle Pageant (Manti, Utah), 328 Morning Fears (Grochowiak), 232 Mortimer, Jennifer, 479 Moscow Art Theatre, 245, 505, 538 Moscow Jewish Theater, 373 Moses, Gilbert, 554 Mostellaria (Plautus), 25 The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told (Rudnick), 329, 344 The Mother-in-Law (Hecyra) (Terence), 26, 393, 408 Mother of 1084 (Devi), 168 The Mother (Witkacy), 229 Mourning Becomes Electra (O’Neill), 501, 502 A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (Kennedy), 518 Movin’ Out (Joel), 363

Mr. Jowialski (Fredro), 221 Mrozek, Slawomir, 235–237, 516 Mrs. Dulska’s Morality (Zapolska), 222 Mrs. Warren’s Profession (Shaw), 405, 420 MTC (Manitoba Theatre Centre), 131, 132 Mukherjee, Arun, 163, 165 Mulatto (Hughes), 295–296, 326 Mule Bone (Hurston), 273 Mulgrave Road Co-op, 136 Mu¨ller, Heiner and Inge, 159 Mulligan Guards (Harrigan and Hart), 357 multicultural Theaters, 136 Mumbai, Indian, 167 Mumming, 178 Munch, Edvard, 426, 429 Mundell, W.L. (Rusty), 369 Munich, Germany, 380–381 Munk, Kaj, 266 Munsford, Robert, 269 Murder, Hope of Women (Kokoschka), 428–429 Murder in The Cathedral (Eliot), 319 Muret, Marc-Antoine de, 53 Murphy, Tom, 184, 185 Murray, Christopher, 178–179, 184 Murrell, John, 135 music and dance, 357–364; ‘‘book’’ musicals, 358–359; cabarets, 147–148, 232, 380–384; Canadian, 132, 137–138; ‘‘compilation revue,’’ 362–363; ‘‘concept’’ music, 362; expressionist devices within, 436–437; Gaelic, 178; Greek drama, 11; Indian drama, 161, 162, 163, 164; Italian Theater, 196–198; megamusicals, 137–138, 363; Polish Theater, 231; revues, 358; symphonic drama, 366–368, 372–373. See also ballet, Russian; operas; specific musicals by name Music Box Review (Berlin), 359 The Music Man (Willson), 361 Muslims, 168 The Mute Canary (Ribemont-Dessaignes), 387 Mutt, R. (Marcel Duchamp), 379–380

Index Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (Brecht), 158 My Fair Lady (Lerner and Loewe), 73, 360 The Myopia (Greenspan), 519 Myste`re d’Adam, 85 The Mysteries (Harrison and Bryden), 329 The Mysteries (Kemp and Mitchell), 329 The Mysteries of Love (Vitrac), 512 The Mystery of Irma Vep (Ludlam), 340 The Mystery Players, 327 mystery plays: Chester cycle, 36, 87, 89– 90, 93, 316, 318, 416; comedy within, 416; historical background and definition of, 36, 48, 86–91, 315–316; influence on contemporary religious drama, 320; N-Town cycle (Ludus Coventriae), 86, 92, 316, 318, 416; revivals of, 328–329; Towneley cycle, 86–87, 316, 328; Wakefield cycle, 86–87, 88, 316, 416, 549; York cycle, 86, 89–90, 316, 416. See also miracle plays myths, 7 Nakai Theatre Ensemble, 136 narrators, 163–164 Narrow Road to the Deep North (Bond), 449 Nasˇi furianti (Stroupezˇnicky´), 145 Nathan der Weise (Lessing), 154, 156 National Arts Centre, Ottawa, 132, 140 The National Theater, Poland, 214 National Theatre, Oslo, 267 National Theatre in Prague, 144, 145 National Theatre School, Montreal, 131 Natir Puja (Tagore), 169 Native American theater, 423 Native Earth Performing Arts, 136, 139 Native Son (Wright), 296 nativity plays, 212, 223. See also religion and religious drama naturalism: French, 498; German, 157– 158, 491; Italian, 198; kitchen sink drama as, 453; nontraditional theaters of, 554; replaced by romanticism, 77; Scandinavian, 258–259, 265, 426, 492;

Zola as founder of, 490–492. See also realism Naughty Marietta (Herbert), 358 Naval Encounter (Goering), 430–431 The Negro in the American Theatre (Isaacs), 323 Neilson, Anthony, 441, 450 Nemorovich-Danchenko, Vladimir, 245, 538 neoclassical drama. See French neoclassical drama Neo-Jacobean movement, 449–450 neorealism, 200, 204, 299–300 neovanguardism, 204 Neptune Theatre, 131 Nero, Emperor of Rome, 28 Neruda, Pablo, 205 Nestroy, Johann Nepomuk, 144, 157 Neuber, Caroline, 240 New Athens (Nowaczynski), 222–223 New Brutalists, 450 New Comedy, 17–18, 23, 25, 400, 415. See also comedies; Plautus, Titus Maccius; Terence The New Deliverance (Witkacy), 229–230 Newley, Anthony, 361 New Objectivity, 433 New PlayRites, 139 New Play Society, 130 The New System (Bjørnson), 259 New World Order (Pinter), 480 New York, United States, 207 New York Theatre Workshop, 344 Nickerson, Harold, 500 Niemann-Raabe, Hedwig, 262 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 424 ’Night, Mother (Norman), 353–355 Nightwood, 136, 139 9 Jhakhoo Hill (Das), 163–164, 166–167, 173 Nitsch, Hermann, 448 Nolan, Paul T., 324 Nomos, 13–14 nontraditional stages. See environmental theater

597

598

Index Nordstrom, Mary, 369 The Normal Heart (Kramer), 341–342, 501 Norman, Marsha, 353–355 Norman Maurice (Simms), 270 Norse sagas, 258, 259 Norton, Frederick, 359 Norton, Thomas, 37 Norwegian drama, 76, 181, 257, 258, 259, 267. See also Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne; Ibsen, Henrik; Scandinavian drama Norwid, Cyprian, 219–220 The Notebook of Trigorin (Williams), 337– 338 Nothing Sacred (Walker), 137 Notre Dame de Paris (musical), 363 Novella, 194 Novello, Ivor, 360, 540 November Night (Wyspianski), 225–226 Nowaczynski, Adolf, 222–223 N-Town cycle plays (Ludus Coventriae), 86, 92, 316, 318, 416 ‘‘Nude Descending a Staircase’’ (Duchamp), 380 Nunn, Trevor, 467 Oberammergau passion play, 93, 324 O’Brien, Eugene, 303 O’Casey, Sean, 183 Occupant (Albee), 482 Octavia, 28 The Odd Couple (Simon), 422 Odets, Clifford, 76, 501 Odyssey (Homer), 19 Oedipus the King (Reinhardt), 553 Oedipus Tyrannus (Sophocles), 5, 13, 521, 522 Offenbach, Jacques, 357 Officium Sepulchri Casinense (Benedictine abbey of Montecassino), 187 Of Thee I Sing (Gershwin), 358 Ogilby, John, 178–179 Oh, Kay! (Gershwin), 358 Oh, These Times! (Catherine The Great), 241 O’Horgan, Tom, 470

Oklahoma! (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 360, 362, 367, 437 Old Cantankerous (Menander), 23 Old Comedy, 8, 16, 415. See also comedies The Old Ones (Wesker), 499 The Old Woman Broods (Rozewicz), 234 Oliver! (Bart), 361 Olivier, Laurence, 468 Ol’ Man Adam and His Chillun (Bradford), 323 Olmo, Lauro, 286 Olympe’s Marriage (Augier), 488–489 On All Fours (Rozewicz), 234 O’Neal, John, 554 One Day in Ashadha (Rakesh), 164 O’Neill, Eugene, 75–76, 77, 266, 435, 436, 477–478, 501–502 The O’Neill (Kilroy), 184 One Yellow Rabbit, 139 On Foot (Mrozek), 236 On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (Sircar), 175 Ontario, Canada, 135 On the Marry-go-Wrong (Feydeau), 409 On the Town (Comden and Green), 362 On the Twentieth Century (Comden and Green), 362 Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, 519, 520 On Your Toes (Rodgers and Hart), 358 open-air theaters, 366–375, 548–550, 551 operas: of German drama, 158, 160; Italian theater, 196–197, 198, 199; Ope´ra Comique, 68; operettas, 357, 359–360, 420; as precursor to Broadway musicals, 357; rock, 462– 472; Romeo and Juliet, adaptations of, 462–472; within Russia, 240, 241. See also music and dance Operetta (Gombrowicz), 231 Opportunities for Youth, 134 Orazia (Aretino), 194 Orbecche (Giraldi), 194 Orchestra (Greek drama), 9, 548 Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 551–552 Oresteia (Aeschylus), 14–15, 501, 556 Orfeo (Monteverdi), 197

Index The Origin of Species (Darwin), 505 Orle´ans, Louis Philippe Joseph, duc d’, 65 The Orphans’ Home cycle (Foote), 274, 309, 310–311 Orpheus Descending (Williams), 336 Orton, Joe, 408, 409 Osborne, John, 73–74, 184, 499 Ostankino Theater, 242 Ostrovsky, Alexander, 251, 493–494 Otello (Boito), 198 Othello (Shakespeare), 41, 45, 194, 434 Other Place (Royal Shakespeare Company), 329 Ott, Gustavo, 206 Ottave, 188 Ottawa, Canada, 140 Otway, Thomas, 487, 488 Our Betters (Maugham), 498 Our God’s Brother (Wojtyla), 233 Our Town (Wilder), 146–147, 334 Out at Sea (Mrozek), 235 outdoor drama, 366–375, 548–550, 551 The Outsider (Borchert), 433 The Overcoat (Gogol), 138 Ovid, 188 Owen, Rochelle, 133 The Ox on the Roof (Milhaud), 509–510 pacifism, 383 PACT (Professional Association of Canadian Theatres), 136 Padilla, Heberto, 204 Padmanabhan, Manjula, 174 Pageant of St. George’s Day, 178 pageant wagons, 89–90, 93–94 Paint Your Wagon (Lerner and Loewe), 360 The Pajama Game (Adler and Ross), 361, 362 Pakledinaz, Martin, 536 Palais-Cardinal Theater, 50 Palais-Royal, 66, 68 Pal Joey (Rodgers and Hart), 359 Pallavicino, Pietro Sforza, 196

Palmer, John, 135 Panama, 206. See also Latin American drama Pandora’s Box (Wedekind), 428 ‘‘Pan-Germanic Poetry Contest’’ (Grosz), 384 Panikkar, K.N., 163, 164 Pankowski, Marian, 237 Panormita, Antonio Beccadelli, 190 The Pantages, 137 Pantomime, 20–21, 23, 178, 232 Panych, Morris, 134, 138 Paper Wheat, 134 Parade (Brown), 364 Parade (Cocteau), 508–509 Paradise Hotel (Foreman), 519 Paradise Lost (Odets), 501 Paradise Now, 438, 554 Paraguay, 206. See also Latin American drama Paris, France, 386–388 Parker, Louis N., 317 Parker, Scott, 371, 372, 374 Parker, Stewart, 185 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 300, 518 Parma, Italy, 550–551 Parodies, 195, 210, 211–212, 295, 299 Parodoi, 10 Parra, Marco Antonio de la, 206 Parsons, Sally Anne, 537 Parthasarathi, Indira, 165, 168 Partita for the Wooden Instrument (Grochowiak), 232 Party (Elkunchwar), 174 The Party (Mrozek), 236 Pashkevich, Vasilii, 241 Passage to Darkness (Deshpande), 172 Passe Muraille, 136 The Passing Show (musical), 358 passion plays: American churchsponsored, 327–328; Czech drama, 142; gay drama, 344; non-biblical material within, 88–89; Oberammergau, 93, 324; outdoor performances of,

599

600

Index 367; The Passion of the Christ (Gibson film), 88–89, 329. See also mystery plays Past One O’clock (Deshpande), 167 Pastoral drama, 57, 188, 194–195, 198 Pastor Ephraim Magnus (Jahnn), 432 Pastor fido (Guarino), 195 Paternoster (Kajzar), 233 Patience (Gilbert and Sullivan), 420 Patricide (Bronnen), 430 Patrick, Robert, 340 Patterson, Tom, 130 Paul, Saint, 86 Paullus, Lucius Aemilius, 21 Paulus (Vergerio), 189–190 Pavlovsky, Eduardo, 204–205 Pazzi, Alessandro de’, 194 Peace (Aristophanes), 7 Peasant into King (Baryka), 212 Peculiar Sam (Hopkins), 295 Peer Gynt (Ibsen), 258 Peisistratus, 8 The Pelicans (Radiguet), 511 Peloponnesian War, 16, 415 Pensaci, Giacomino! (Pirandello), 199 Pentecost (Frield), 185 Penthesilea (Kleist), 156 Pepys, Samuel, 97 Percy, Esme´, 468 Perdziola, Robert, 536 Perestroika (Kushner), 344, 346–347 Pe´ret, Breton and Benjamin, 388 Performance Group, 554 Peri, Jacopo, 197 Pericles (Shakespeare), 41 Periferie (Langer), 147 Peripeteia, 455, 456 Perman, Lukas, 469–470 Persians (Aeschylus), 14 Pertharite (Corneille), 61 Peru, 201, 205. See also Latin American drama Pe´ruse, Jean de, 53 Peterson, Eric, 134 Peter Squentz (Gryphius), 154

Peter the Great, 239–240 Petrarca, Francesco (Petrarch), 189 The Phantom of the Opera (Webber), 137, 363 Phe´dre et Hippolyte (Pradon), 68 Phe´dre (Racine), 63, 68 Philadelphia, Here I Come! (Friel), 184 Philaster (Beaumont and Fletcher), 44 Philoctetes (Sophocles), 11–12 Philodoxus, 190 Philologia (Petrarch), 189 photomontage, 384 physical humor, 195–196, 407. See also comedies Pianoforte (Szaniawski), 231 The Piano Lesson (Wilson), 300 Pianto della Madonna (Todi), 188 Piave, Francesco Maria, 198 Picabia, Francis, 388–389 Picasso, Pablo, 508, 509 Pike Theatre, 183 The Pillars of Society (Ibsen), 258, 259 Pinochet, Augusto, 206 Pins and Needles (Rome), 359 Pinter, Daniel, 477 Pinter, Harold, 474–484; greatness of, 411, 477–478, 484; life and career of, 457– 459, 475–477, 479; as minimalist, 441; natural speech emphasized by, 540; on Blasted, 441–442; on meaning, 460; on the absurd, 422; rational rejected by, 421; realism combined with absurdism, 77; work of, 477–484 Pippin (Schwartz), 363 Pirandello, Luigi, 199–200, 203 Piscator, Erwin, 148, 386 Platter, Thomas, 52 Plautus, Titus Maccius: characters of, 400; development of comedy and, 23, 24–26, 415; drama influenced by, 28, 38, 53, 57, 65, 82–83, 190–193; ‘‘holiday humor’’ within, 405–406; Menaechmi, 396; Menander as influence, 18; Miles Gloriosus, 395, 398; on Greek drama, 20; Roman era performances of, 81;

Index characters of, 392; temporary stages used for, 548 Play About Sex (Albee), 476 The Playboy of The Western World (Synge), 182, 183 The Play Called Corpus Christi (Kolve), 315 Play Centre/Playwrights Theatre Centre, 139 playhouses. See theaters and playhouses Play of Adam, 85 The Play of Artexerxes (Gregory), 239 Play of Daniel, 84 The Play of Herod, 84 Play of the Sacrament, 86 Plays for A Negro Theater (Torrence), 321, 322 Plays Unpleasant (Shaw), 498 play-within-a-play construct, 54–55, 58– 59, 105–107, 163, 168 playwrights: creacio´n colectiva, 205; criticism of (see dramatic criticism); dramaturg’s work with, 543; gay (see Gay drama); women as, 45, 129, 139, 144, 206, 350–356. See also specific playwrights by name Playwrights’ Studio Group, 129 Playwrights’ Workshop of Montreal, 139 The Pleasure Man (West), 334 Plenty (Hare), 74 The Plough and the Stars (O’Casey), 183 Pocahontas (Custis), 269 Podesta´, Pablo, 202 Poel, William, 318, 468 Poetices Libri Septem (Scaliger), 54 poetic realism, defined, 486. See also realism Poetics (Aristotle): drama defined and codified by, 81, 395–396, 415–416, 454, 466; on history of comedy and tragedy, 6–7, 11; translations and commentaries, 53–54, 61, 194, 417. See also Aristotle poets and poetry: choral poetry, 6, 7–8, 9– 10; English Renaissance, 37, 39; epic

poetry, 99; Greek drama as, 7–8; sound poetry, 386 Polgar, Alfred, 147 Police (Mrozek), 235 Polish Laboratory Theatre, 553 Polish theater, 209–238; 1795 partition of Poland, 214, 217; 1830 Insurrection, 225–226; censorship of, 214; early history of, 209–212; nineteenth century, 214–224; political enslavement of Poland, 224; seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 212–214; surrealism, 512–514, 516; twentieth century to the present, 220–237 political satire, 276, 278, 419–421, 423. See also satire Politics and Passion (Schiller), 488 Poliziano, Angelo, 188, 194–195 Pollock, Sharon, 135 Polotsky, Simeon, 239 Polyeucte (Corneille), 60 Pompey the Great, 22 ‘‘poor’’ theater, 553–554 Pope of Fools, 189 Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste. See Molie`re Porgy and Bess (Gershwin), 358 Porta, Giovan Battista Della, 194 Porter, Cole, 359 Portman, Jamie, 132 Portugal, 201–202 Possession (LaBute), 307 Poulenc, Francis, 510 Pradon, Jacques, 68 Praga, Marco, 198 Prague, Czech Republic, 143, 144, 148 Prairie Theatre Exchange, 136 Pre´ciosite, 65 Preissova´, Gabriela, 144 Presgurvic, Ge´rard, 462–463, 464–466, 467, 469–472 ‘‘Press Conference’’ (Pinter), 479 Priestley, J.B., 499 Prince, Harold, 362 Prince, Lucy Terry, 292 The Prince (Machiavelli), 192

601

602

Index Princess Ida (Gilbert and Sullivan), 420 Princess of Wales Theatre, 137 printing presses, 32 Prinz Friedrich von Homburg (Kleist), 156 Private Lives (Coward), 403, 420–421 Proagons, 9 Prochniewski, Marek, 237 The Producers (Brooks), 362, 363–364 production programs, 542 Proehl, Geoffrey, 543, 544 Professional Association of Canadian Theatres (PACT), 136 Professor Taranne (Adamov), 515 Progressive Arts Clubs, 129 Prokofiev, Sergei, 197, 464 Prokopovich, Feofan, 239 Proletarian Theatre, 386 The Promise (Glen Rose, Texas), 328 propriety, 58, 61, 69 Proscenium theaters and modern stage, 550–552 The Pro-Slavery Argument (Simms), 270 Prosser, Eleanor, 316, 324 Protagonistes, 9 Protasis, 54 Protesilas and Leodamia (Wyspianski), 223–224 Protestantism: within Bohemia, 143; Catholic Church vs., 178, 210; within England, 31–32, 95, 96; within France, 56; within Ireland, 180, 185. See also Reformation; religion and religious drama Protest (Havel), 151 Proteus, 31 Provincetown Players, 435, 505, 544 Przybyszewski, Stanislaw, 219, 227 Pseudolus (Plautus), 24–25 Psychoanalysis, 507–508. See also Freud, Sigmund Publikumsbeschimpfung (Handke), 159 Puccini, Giacomo, 197, 198 Puerto Rican Theater, 203, 204, 207. See also Latin American drama Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, 207

Puig, Manuel, 342 Punch and Judy show, 407 Puppet Theater, 143, 212–213, 232, 514, 556–557 Pure Form, 513 Purgatory (Yeats), 181, 184 Puritan movement, 32, 36, 38, 86, 93 Purlie Victorious (Davis), 555 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 242 Pygmalion (Shaw), 73, 360, 420, 529 The Quare Fellow (Behan), 183–184 ‘‘Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns’’ (Dacier), 69 Quebec Theatre, 138, 139. See also French-Canadian drama Queer Nation, 344 Questa sera si recita a soggetto (Pirandello), 199 Quinn, Michael, 147 Quirinal palace of The Pope, 190 Rabelais, Franc¸ois, 407 race. See specific race by name Racine, Jean, 61–64, 68, 156, 197 Radiance of Fatherhood (Wojtyla), 233 Radical comedy, 420–421 Radical Theology and the Death of God (Hamilton and Altizer), 327 Radiguet, Raymond, 511 radio drama, 129–130, 232, 233, 319–320, 433 Rado, James, 361 Radok, Alfre´d, 148–149 Ragni, Gerome, 361 Ragtime (Flaherty and Ahrens), 364 Raimund Theater, 465–466 A Raisin in the Sun (Hansberry), 296–297, 501 Rakesh, Mohan, 164 Ralegh, Walter, 31 Ramayana (Valmiki), 165 Ramos-Perea, Roberto, 206 Ramsey, Margaret, 76 Rape of Proserpina (Claudian), 188

Index Rapin, Rene´, 69 Rappresentazione e festa di Abraam e Isaac (Belcari), 188 Raquel (Garcı´a de la Huerta), 281 Rasco´n Banda, Vı´ctor Hugo, 206 Raszewski, Zbigniew, 209 Rath-yatra (Tagore), 169 Rattigan, Terence, 499 Ravenhill, Mark, 450 Ray, Satyajit, 162 Rayographs, 387–388 Rea, Stephen, 185 ‘‘Readymade’’ art (Duchamp), 380 Reagan administration, 342, 344 realism, 485–502; American drama, 500– 502; Austrian, 497–498; Chekhov, 495– 496; critical, defined, 486; English drama, 89–90, 498–500; Gorky, 496– 497; Hauptmann, 491; historical context of, 77, 505; Ibsen, 181, 264– 265, 489–490; as an impulse, 485–486; Irish drama, 183; Italian drama, 197; kitchen sink drama, 453; Latin American drama, 204; opposing movements, 425, 504, 506; poetic, defined, 486; Polish theater, 221–222, 232; Russian, 492–497; Spanish drama, 283–284; stage design for, 551; Strindberg, 492; survey of modern plays, 504–506; Toller, 433; Turgenev, 494–495; Zola, 490–491. See also naturalism; neorealism Reaney, James, 135 Re cervo (Gozzi), 197 Records of Early English Drama (University of Toronto Press), 87 Redha, 465 Red, Hot, and Blue (Porter), 359 Red Lion Theatre, 37 The Red Room (Strindberg), 265 Rees, Adya van, 383 Re´flexions sur la poe´tique d’Aristote (Rapin), 69 Reformation, 31–32, 36, 86. See also Protestantism

The Refugee (Currimbhoy), 168 The Rehearsal (Villiers), 105–111 Reinhardt, Max, 147, 381, 552, 553 Reinhardt, Paul, 533 Rej, Mikolaj, 210 Relaˆche (Picabia), 388–389 religion and religious drama, 314–330; African American drama, 296, 326; American drama, 320–329; autos sacramentales, 277, 279; churches as theaters, 549; church services, 83–85; contemporary drama, 302–312; early Christian opposition to drama, 81, 82, 314; early history of, 314–317; English drama, 31–32, 36–37, 317–320; expressionists and, 426–427; French Neoclassical Drama, 48; Greek drama, 9, 13; ‘‘holiday humor’’ as result of, 405–406; Indian drama, 161, 163, 165, 168–171; influence on Albee, 483; influence on Foote, 308–309; influence on LaBute, 306; In Yer Face Theater, 444–445; Irish early drama, 178; Italian drama, 187–188; Latin American drama, 201–202; miracle plays, 86, 178, 315–316; morality plays, 36–37, 41, 46, 86, 91–93, 210, 232; mystery plays, Chester cycle, 36, 87, 89–90, 93, 316, 318, 416; mystery plays, comedy within, 416; mystery plays, influence on contemporary religious drama, 320; mystery plays, N-Town cycle (Ludus Coventriae), 86, 92, 316, 318, 416; mystery plays, revivals of, 328–329; mystery plays, Towneley cycle, 86–87, 316, 328; mystery plays, Wakefield cycle, 86–87, 88, 316, 416, 549; mystery plays, York cycle, 86, 89–90, 316, 416; mystery plays, historical background and definition of, 36, 48, 86–91, 315– 316; outdoor performances of, 367; passion plays, American churchsponsored, 327–328; passion plays, Czech drama, 142; passion plays, gay drama, 344; passion plays, non-biblical

603

604

Index material within, 88–89; passion plays, Oberammergau, 93, 324; passion plays, outdoor performances of, 367; passion plays, The Passion of the Christ (Gibson film), 88–89, 329; pastoral drama, 57, 188, 194–195, 198; Polish theater, 209– 212, 214–216, 217, 219–220, 231, 233– 234; Puritan movement, 32, 36, 38, 86, 93; Russian drama, 239; saint plays, 86; Scandinavian playwrights, 266; Spanish drama, 276; traditional views challenged by, 329–330; tragedies, 56. See also Catholic Church and Catholicism; Protestantism Renaissance drama: Czech drama, 145; dramatic comedy, 416–417; within England (see English drama, Elizabethan); French Neoclassical Drama, 53–54; Italian drama, 32, 189– 196; Latin American drama, 201–202; Polish drama, 209–211; realism, 486– 489; sexual confusion within, 333; skepticism of, 39; Spanish drama, 278; tragedies, defined, 486–487 Rent (Larson), 364, 470 repartee, defined, 402 Repercussion Theatre, 139 resources for actors, 530, 531, 560 Restoration drama. See English drama, Restoration The Resurrection (Yeats), 317 The Return of a Prodigal Son (Brandstaetter), 233 The Return of Odysseus (Wyspianski), 226 Return to Reason (Ray), 387–388 revenge plays, 38–39 The Revenger’s Tragedy (Tourneur), 45 revues, 358 The Reward of Virtue (Strindberg), 265 The Rez Sisters (Highway), 139 Rhorem, Ned, 476 Rhubarb! Festival, 139 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, 387 Rice, Elmer, 435, 436 Rice, Tim, 326–327, 363

Richard III (Shakespeare), 434, 523, 556 Richard II (Shakespeare), 33, 93 Richards, David, 343 Richardson, Jessie, 136 Richardson, Willis, 273, 326 Richelieu, Cardinal, 50, 58 Richter, Hans, 383, 387 The Rider of Dreams (Torrence), 321, 322 Riders to the Sea (Synge), 185 Ridiculous Theatrical Company, 340 Riel (Coulter), 130 Rinaldi, Antonio, 241 The Ring of a Grand Lady (Norwid), 219–220 Ringwood, Gwen Pharis, 129 Rinuccini, Ottavio, 196–197 Rı´os, Edda de los, 206 Rising Tide Theatre, 136 The Rite of Spring (Stravinsky), 508 Rittner, Tadeusz, 227 The Ritz (McNally), 340, 343 The Rivals (Sheridan), 180 Rivas, Duque de, 282 Roads (Deshpande), 167, 169 The Roads to Home (Foote), 309 The Road to the Graveyard (Foote), 309 Roanoke Island, North Carolina, 370–371 The Roaring Girl (Dekker and Middleton), 43 The Robbers (Schiller), 494 Robbins, Jerome, 362, 464 Roberta (Kern), 359 Robin Hood (De Koven), 357 Robins, Elizabeth, 262, 265 Robotello, Francesco, 417 Robots, 145–146 Roche, Anthony, 184 Roche, Emeline Clarke, 535 rock opera, 462–472. See also music and dance Rodgers, Richard, 358–359, 360, 367, 437 Rodrigues, Nelson, 203 Rojas, Fernando de, 277 Rojas Zorrilla, Francisco de, 279

Index Roman Catholic Cardinal Newman Fund, 323–324 Roman Catholic Church. See Catholic Church romances. See tragicomedies Roman drama, 19–28; actors of, 19, 22– 23, 82; comedies, 20, 23–26, 65, 400, 415; fall of Rome, 81–82; farce, 408– 409; Greek drama vs., 81–82; Greek influence upon, 18, 19–20, 23–24, 26– 27; influence upon French Neoclassical drama, 53–54, 65, 69; influence upon Restoration drama, 96; overview of, 19– 21; performance of, 21–23, 27, 373, 548; tragedies, 26–28; violence within, 5. See also classical drama Romans in Britain (Brenton), 441, 449 romantic comedy, 403–406 romanticism, 77, 259, 270–271, 282–283, 488, 504 Romberg, Sigmund, 359 Rome, Harold, 359 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 194, 397, 462–472 Rome´o et Juliette (Berlioz), 463 The Room (Pinter), 476 Roots (Wesker), 499 Rosalba y los Llaveros (Carballido), 204 Rose, Lloyd, 138 Rose, Martial, 328 Rose-Marie (Hammerstein and Friml), 359 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Stoppard), 411 Rosmersholm (Ibsen), 265 Rosmunda (Rucellai), 194 Ross, Jerry, 361 Rossel, Sven, 257–258 Roston, Murray, 317 Rostworowski, Karol Hubert, 226–227 Rota, Nino, 469 Roth, Ann, 536 Routes and Escape Routes (Bhagat), 168, 169, 171, 173 The Rover (Behn), 393 Rovner, Eduardo, 206

Rowley, William, 40 Royal Alexandra Theatre, 137 Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Canada), 131 Royal Court Theater of England, 73–74 Royal Ontario Museum Theatre, 130 Royal Shakespeare Company, 329, 467 Royal Society of English, 34 Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, 259 Rozewicz, Tadeusz, 234, 516 Rucellai, Giovanni, 194 Rudali (Ganguli), 171, 173 Rudnick, Paul, 329, 344 Rum and Vodka (McPherson), 304 Rural Dionysia, 8. See also Festival of Dionysus ˇ apek), 145–146 R.U.R (C Russian drama: eighteenth century, 239– 242; modern drama, 74, 76, 77; nontraditional theaters within, 552; realism, 492–497. See also Chekhov, Anton Russian Imperial Ballet, 240 Russian State Theatre, 240 rustic farces, 195 Ryan, Carrie, 541 Ryga, George, 132 Sachs, Hans, 154 Sackville, Thomas, 37 Sacra rappresentazione, 188–189 sacred plays, 48, 188–189, 196. See also mystery plays The Sacrifice of Isaac (Poel production), 318 ‘‘Sailing to Byzantium’’ (Yeats), 312 The Sailor (Szaniawski), 231 Sainetes, 281 Saint Denis, Michel, 528 Saint Germain and Saint Laurent fairs, 51 Saint Patrick for Ireland (Shirley), 179 saint plays, 86 Sakharam Binder (Tendulkar), 170, 173 Salomea’s Silver Dream (Slowacki), 217

605

606

Index Salome (Wilde), 317 Salzburg Cathedral, 553 Sam, the Highest Jumper of Them All (Saroyan), 515 Samizdat, 151 Sa´nchez, Florencio, 202 Sa´nchez, Mario Ernesto, 207 The Sanctuary Lamp (Murphy), 185 Sanders, Leslie Catherine, 326 Sanskrit drama, 164 Santana, Rodolfo, 206 Santayana, George, 397, 403, 413 Saroyan, William, 422, 514–515 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 421–422 Saskatoon, Canada, 139 Sastre, Alfonso, 286 Satie, Erik, 388–389, 508, 509 satire: burlesque, defined, 105; Canadian, 130; city comedy, 40, 42–44; ‘‘comedy of manners’’ as, 111–112; Czech, 146, 150; defined, 105–106, 121; female characters within, 115–116, 120; French Neoclassical drama, 65; indirect, 416; Italian, 189; Latin American, 204; mockumentaries, 109; overview of, 398–400; Polish Theater, 213; political, 276, 278, 419–421, 423; Restoration drama, 105–111; U.S. Civil War era drama, 270. See also comedies Saturday Night Live (television), 398 Saturnalia, 189 satyr-dramas, 5–6, 9, 12–15, 415 Saul (Alfieri), 197 Sau¨l le furieux (La Taille), 56 Saved (Bond), 441, 449 Saverio el cruel (Arlt), 203 Sayers, Dorothy L., 319–320, 329–330 Scaliger, Jules-Ce´sar, 53–54, 56 Scandinavian drama, 71–72, 74, 76, 257– 267. See also Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne; Ibsen, Henrik; Strindberg, August Scaurus, Mamercus, 27–28 scenic design. See theaters and playhouses; specific companies by name Schaeffer, Boguslaw, 237

Schechner, Richard, 554 Scherl, Adolf, 148 Schiller, Friedrich, 155–156, 157, 488, 494 Schmid, Herta, 147 Schmidt, Harvey, 361 Schneider, Alan, 478 Schnitzler, Arthur, 158 Schola ludus (Komensky), 143 Scho¨nberg, Claude-Michel, 363 The School for Scandal (Sheridan), 180, 402, 420 Schreidramen (‘‘scream plays’’), 429–430, 433. See also expressionism Schumann, Peter, 438, 556–557 Schwartz, Stephen, 326, 327, 363 Schwartz. Arthur, 359 Schwerner, Michael, 555 Schwitters, Kurt, 386, 389 scientific positivism, 411, 491, 505 Scott, Elka, 556 Scottish ceilidh, 421 ‘‘The Scream’’ (Munch), 426 ‘‘scream plays,’’ 429–430, 433. See also expressionism Scribe, Euge`ne, 455 Scude´ry, Georges de, 55, 67, 70 Sdrucciolo, 191 The Seagull (Chekhov), 245–255 passim, 337, 495–496, 530 Sebillet, Thomas, 53 Second Manifesto (Breton), 512 ‘‘Second Shepherds’ Play,’’ 36, 88, 316 Seconds of Pleasure (LaBute), 307 Second Treatise on Government (Locke), 102 The Secret of Heaven (Lagerkvist), 266 Seed of Adam (Williams), 319 Se´gur, J.-A. de, 463 Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore (Pirandello), 199 Selden, Samuel, 372, 374 The Self-Tormenter (Terence), 26 Seneca, 26–28; 18, influence of, 28, 38, 53, 56, 81, 196; ‘‘Senecan’’ violence,

Index 194, 522; surviving dramas of, 20, 26; temporary stages used for, 548 Separate Tables (Rattigan), 499 Serf Theaters, 242 set designers, role of, 534–535, 537. See also theaters and playhouses Seven Blowjobs (Wellman), 518 Seven Steps Around The Fire (Dattani), 170 The Shadow of a Gunman (O’Casey), 183 The Shadow of The Glen (Synge), 183 Shaiman, Mark, 364 Shairp, Mordaunt, 334 Shakespeare, William, 40–41; All’s Well That Ends Well, 41, 417; ‘‘All The world’s a stage,’’ 31; As You Like It, 31, 41, 529–530, 531; Catherine the Great influenced by, 241; comedies of, 403, 405–406, 417–418; Greek influence upon, 418; Hamlet, interest in state affairs within, 41; Hamlet, life force behind characters, 392, 406; Hamlet, mystery plays alluded to within, 93; Hamlet, on new science, 35; Hamlet, Polish theater influenced by, 216–217, 230–231; Hamlet, Sumarokov’s neoclassical version of, 240; Hamlet, The Spanish Tragedy as precursor to, 38; Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet vs., 464; Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Stoppard) based on, 411; Henry IV, Part 1, 556; Henry V, 396; iambic pentameter, 156; Indian drama influenced by, 165, 169; Italian Renaissance influences upon, 194; Jessner’s staging of, 434; King Lear, 41, 93, 396, 442, 446, 451; Macbeth, 41, 165, 387, 434, 442, 522; Measure for Measure, 417; medieval mystery plays as influence, 93; The Merchant of Venice, 41, 417; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 40; metatheaters within plays, 39; modern satires of, 387; Othello, 41, 45, 194, 434; outdoor performances of, 366, 367, 368, 549–550; Polish theater influenced by, 216–217, 221, 230–231;

resources for actors of, 530; revivals of, 130–131, 139, 467, 551–552, 556; Richard II, 33, 93; Richard III, 434, 523, 556; Roman influence upon, 28; Romeo and Juliet, 194, 397, 462–472; Russian adaptations of, 240; stock figures of, 418; The Tempest, 30, 41, 44; Titus Andronicus, 45; tragicomedies and romances of, 43–44; Twelfth Night, 41, 396, 404–407, 522, 556; vice characters created by, 37, 41; The Winter’s Tale, 142; women as characters, 45. See also English drama, Elizabethan Shakespearean Festival Theatre, 552 Shakespeare’s R&J (John Housman Studio Theatre), 462 ‘‘Shakespeare’s Sister’’ (Woolf), 45 Shaki, Marjan, 470 Shange´, Ntozake, 299 Sharaff, Irene, 535–536 Sharma, Partap, 164, 172 Sharma, Tripurari, 169, 171 Shaw, George Bernard: Arms and The Man, 401, 419–420; Candida, 420; comedy of manners, 401; GranvilleBarker as director of, 73, 539; Ibsen’s influence upon, 74, 257, 262, 498; Irish themes, 180; John Bull’s Other Island, 180; Major Barbara, 419–420; Man and Superman, 404; Mrs. Warren’s Profession, 405, 420; on Poel’s Romeo and Juliet, 468; Plays Unpleasant, 498; political satire of, 419–420; Pygmalion, 73, 360, 420, 529; as a realist, 498; romantic comedy, 404; Royal Court theater productions, 73; You Never Can Tell, 406 Shaw Festival, 132, 139 Shchepkin, Mikhail, 242 Shepard, Sam, 77, 518 Sheremetev, Count Peter, 242 Sheremetev, Nikolai, 242 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 180, 402, 409, 419, 420 Sheridan, Thomas, 179

607

608

Index Sherman, Martin, 341 She Stoops to Conquer (Goldsmith), 180, 395 Shining City (McPherson), 303–306, 312 Ship’s Company, 136 Shirley, James, 179 ‘‘Shock the bourgeois,’’ 448 The Shoemaker’s Holiday (Dekker), 43, 487 Shoemakers (Witkacy), 229, 236 Shopping and Fucking (Ravenhill), 450 A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of The English Stage (Collier), 98, 121–122 Show Boat (Kern and Hammerstein), 359 Shudras, 171 The Siberian Shaman (Catherine the Great), 241 Sicily, Italy, 5–6, 189 Siculus, Calpurnius, 188 Sicyon, Greece, 7 Side by Side (Sondheim), 362–363 Sidney, Philip, 38 Sidney, Sir Henry, 178 Siedle, Caroline, 534 The Siege of Rhodes (Davenant), 98–99 Sienkiewicz, Henry, 317 Sierz, Aleks, 450 The Sign of The Cross (Barrett), 317 Sigurd Slembe (Bjørnson), 259 Silence! The Court Is In Session (Tendulkar), 173 The Silent Woman (Jonson), 42 Silly Jack (Rittner), 227 Silvanire, ou la Morte-vive (Mairet), 57–58 The Silver Tassie (O’Casey), 183 Siminovitch Prize, 137 Simms, William Gilmore, 270 Simon, Neil, 404, 422 Simon The Cyrenian (Torrence), 321–323 Sincerity Forever (Wellman), 518 Sircar, Badal, 163, 172, 174–175 Siri Sampige (Kambar), 163, 165 Sissies’ Scrapbook (Kramer), 341 Sito, Jerzy, 232

situational comedy, 28, 221–222 ‘‘The Six,’’ 510 Skene, 9–10, 548 The Skin Game (Galsworthy), 499 Skinner, Edith, 531 The Skriker (Churchill), 516 Slaughterhouse (Mrozek), 236 slavery within U.S., 269–271, 291–292, 296 slaves, Roman, 23 Slavonic-Greek-Latin Academy, 239 Sloane Square, 73 Slobodzianek, Tadeusz, 237 Slowacki, Juliusz, 216–218 Small Craft Warnings (Williams), 337 Smith, Dinitia, 306 Smock Alley, 179 Smokey Joe’s Cafe´ (Lieber and Stoller), 363 SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), 554 Snow Camp, North Carolina, 371–372 socialism, 74, 148–151 sociology, 505 Sofonisba (Trissino), 194 Sokolovskii, Mikhail, 241 The Soldier’s Fortune (Otway), 487 The Soldiers (Lenz), 488 Something Cloudy, Something Clear (Williams), 338 Sondheim, Stephen, 358, 362, 363 song and dance. See ballet, Russian; music and dance ‘‘Song of the Flying-fish and Seahorses’’ (Traeber), 383 Songs and Sonnets, 32–33 The Son (Hasenclever), 430, 433–434 Sonntag, Susan, 151 Son of a Pioneer (Greenspan), 518–519 Sophisticated Ladies (Ellington), 363 Sophocles: French translations of, 53; Greek tragedy defined by, 5, 11–12, 13– 14, 521, 522; as ‘‘most Hemoric,’’ 7; Roman drama influenced by, 17, 18; third actor added by, 11 Sophonisbe (Mairet), 58

Index Sorel, Edward, 478 Sorge, Reinhard, 429 Sor Juana Ine´s de la Cruz, Sister, 202 Sothern, E.H., 468 Soulpepper company, 139 The Sound of Music (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 360 sound poetry, 386 Soupault, Philippe, 387, 389 Southern, Richard, 328 Southerne, Thomas, 487–488 Southern U.S. drama, 268–274 South Pacific (Rodgers and Hammerstein), 360 Spanish Civil War, 203 Spanish drama, 275–288; autos sacramentales, 277, 279; censorship of, 286; early Spain, 274–277; eighteenth century, 280–281; Franco dictatorship, 285–286; Golden Age drama, 277–280; Latin American drama influenced by, 201–202; liturgical plays within, 93; medieval Spain, 286, 549; nineteenth century, 281–284; twentieth century to the present, 284–286 Spanish Repertory Theatre, 207 The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), 38–39 Sparta, 16–17 Speak With Distinction (Skinner), 531 special effects, 57, 97, 138. See also theaters and playhouses Spectacle, 19 Spencer, Herbert, 505 Speroni, Sperone, 194 spirituality. See belief in contemporary drama; religion and religious drama Spreading the News (Gregory), 182 The Spring of Nations in the Quiet Corner (Nowaczynski), 222–223 Spring’s Awakening (Wedekind), 427–428 The SS Glencairn (O’Neill), 75–76 Stage (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 129–130 stage design. See theaters and playhouses; specific companies by name

Stage Irishman, 180 Stallings, Laurence, 500 Stanislavsky, Konstantin, 242, 245, 247, 505, 527, 528, 538 Stara´ historie (Zeyer), 145 Stationendrama (Strindberg), 426–427, 436 Stations of the Cross, 426 Stebbins, Emma, 467 Steele, Sir Richard, 179–180 Ste´fano (Disce´polo), 203 Stehlı´kova´, Eva, 149 Steiner, Edward, 324 Sˇteˇpa´nek, Jan Nepomuk, 144 the Sterling awards, 136 Stern, Charlotte, 277 Stewart, Michael, 362 Still Stands The House (Ringwood), 129 St. John’s, Canada, 139 St. Laurent, Louis, 131 St. Lawrence Centre, 132 St. Nicholas (McPherson), 304 stock figures, 195–196, 394–397, 416, 418 stoicism, 27 Stoller, Mike, 363 Stone Theatre, 241 Stonewall riot of 1969, 340 Stoppard, Tom, 74, 151, 411, 516 Stop the World, I Want to Get Off (Newley and Bricusse), 361 Storbach, Hans, 434 Storey, David, 485, 499–500 Storm and Stress generation, 155 The Storm (Ostrovsky), 494 The Story of The Most Glorious Resurrection of Our Lord (Michael), 209–210 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 270 St. Petersburg, Russia, 240, 241 Strange Interlude (O’Neill), 436, 502 The Strange Passenger (Karpowicz), 235 Strasberg, Lee, 530 Stratford Festival, 130–131, 139, 467, 552 Strauss, Richard, 158 Stravinsky, Igor, 508

609

610

Index stream-of-consciousness techniques, 147 A Streetcar Named Desire (Williams), 272– 273, 335–336, 437, 502 street entertainers, 36, 51–52 Streisand, Barbra, 362 Strife (Galsworthy), 499 Strindberg, August: expressionism, 426– 427; influence and revivals of, 257, 435, 437, 438; life and career of, 265–267; naturalism, 505; Przybyszewski and, 227; realism, 492; surrealism, 508–509 Stroman, Susan, 362 Stroupezˇnicky´, Ladislav, 145 Strouse, Charles, 361 Stuart monarchy, 33, 95–96 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 554 The Student Prince (Romberg), 359 Studia humanitatis, 189 Study guides for productions, 542 Styan, J.L., 263 Styne, Jule, 362 Suburban Motel (Walker), 139 The Subway (Rice), 436 Suddenly Last Summer (Williams), 273, 337 Sukhovo-Kobylin, Alexander, 493 Sullivan, Arthur, 357, 420 Sumarokov, Aleksandr Petrovich, 240, 241 Summer and Smoke (Williams), 273, 336 Summer (Rittner), 227 Sumner, Mark, 367, 368, 369, 370–371, 372 Sunday in the Park with George (Sondheim), 362 From Sunset to Sunrise (Verma), 170 Sure´na (Corneille), 62 Surprise (Rostworowski), 227 surrealism, 507–520; absurdist drama and, 515; American drama, 514–516, 517, 518–520; within Belgium, 514; characteristics and purpose of, 507– 508, 509; Cocteau, 509–510; Dada and, 379, 381, 389, 390, 509; English drama,

516–517; French drama, 511–512; origin of term, 509; Polish theater, 512– 514; Scandinavian drama, 265, 508– 509 Surrealist Manifesto (Breton), 507–508 Surrender to the Enemy (Green), 372 Sutra-dhar plays, 163 Swedish ballet company, 389 Swedish companies within America, 423 Swedish drama, 266. See also Scandinavian drama; Strindberg, August Sweeney in the Trees (Saroyan), 515 Sweeney Todd (Sondheim), 362 Sweet Bird of Youth (Williams), 336, 502 Sweet Charity (Coleman and Fields), 362 Swiss drama, 159 Sword of Peace (Snow Camp), 371 Sylvia, or the Goat (Albee), 482–483 symphonic drama, 366–368, 372–373 Synge, John Millington, 180–181, 182– 183, 185 Syracuse, Greece, 5–6 Szaniawski, Jerzy, 231 Szopki, 212–213, 223 Taeuber, Sophie, 383 Tagore, Rabindranath, 162, 164, 169, 173–174 Tahanrih, Ukraine (Taganrog), 243 Tailleferre, Germaine, 510 The Tailor (Mrozek), 236 Taine, Hippolyte, 505 Take Me Out (Greenberg), 347 Talbot’s Boxl (Kilroy), 184 Tales from the Vienna Woods (Horva´th), 498 The Tales of King Arthur, 404 talk drama, 456, 457–460 Tamahnous Theatre, 134 Tambours Sur La Digue (The´aˆtre du Soleil), 555–556 Tamburlaine the Great (Marlowe), 38, 39–40

Index The Taming of The Shrew (Shakespeare), 41, 45 Tango (Mrozek), 236, 516 Tapati (Tagore), 174 Tara (Dattani), 172 Tara Hall, 177–178 Tarelkin’s Death (Sukhovo-Kobylin), 493 Tarragon Theatre, 135, 136 Tartuffe (Molie`re), 399, 400, 531 Tasso, Torquato, 57, 194, 195 Tate, Allen, 271 Taylor, Kate, 138 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 464 Tea and Sympathy (Anderson), 338, 500– 501 Teatro Avante, 207 Teatro de la Luna, 207 Teatro de los Andes, 205 Teatro del Pueblo, 203 Teatro Experimental de Cali, 204 Teatro Farnese, 550–551 Teatro Sant’Angelo, 197 Teatro Ulises, 203 Teatrum mundi, 225 TEC (Teatro Experimental de Cali), 205 Tecumseh!, 369 Te´llez, Gabriel. See Molina, Tirso de The Tempest (Shakespeare), 30, 41, 44 Tender Mercies (Foote), 308–311 Tendulkar, Vijay, 169, 170, 171, 173 Ten Lost Years (Toronto Workshop Productions), 134 Terence: characters of, 25, 26, 400; comedy development by, 20, 23, 24, 25, 26, 393, 415; farce, 408; French neoclassical drama influenced by, 53, 54; medieval drama revivals of, 82; Menander as influence, 18; performance during Roman era, 81; Renaissance drama influenced by, 28, 38, 189, 190–191, 192; stage design of, 548, 550–551 Terrorists (Iredynski), 233 Terry, Ellen, 468 Tertulian, 82

Tesauro, Emanuele, 196 Tesori, Jeanine, 364 theater, defined, 5 ‘‘theater apart,’’ 232–233 Theater Calgary, 135 Theater of Cruelty, 512 Theater of disintegration, 441–444 Theater of panic, 449 ‘‘Theater of The Absurd’’ (Esslin), 411. See also absurdist drama theaters and playhouses, 546–557; basic components of, 546; Bohemian, 143; of Chekhov drama, 249, 250; English Renaissance, 37–38, 46; French Neoclassical, 48–50; Greek, 9–10; Indian, 162; Latin American, 203; of Molie`re, 66; of mystery plays, 89–90; nontraditional stages, 552–557; origins of, 546, 547; outdoor drama, 366–375, 548–550, 551; of Racine, 64; realism of, 505, 551; Restoration drama, 97; set designers, role of, 534–535, 537; special effects, 57, 97, 138; traditional stages, 547–552. See also specific theaters and companies by name The Theatre, London, 549 The Theatre and Its Double (Artaud), 448, 512 The´aˆtre de la Fontaine, 55 The´aˆtre de la Rue Gue´ ne´guad, 68 The´aˆtre de Quat’Sous, 139 The´aˆtre du Marais, 50, 68 The´aˆtre du Soleil, 555–556 The´aˆtre-Franc¸aise, 68 The Theatre Guild, 435, 544 The´aˆtre-Italien, 68 The´aˆtre Libre, Paris, 505, 538 ‘‘The Theatre of Catastrophe,’’ 438 ‘‘Theatre of Cruelty,’’ 448 Theatre of Dionysus, 548 Theatre of Pompey, 548 Theatre on the Balustrade, 150 Theatre Passe Muraille, 133–134 The Theatre Royal (‘‘Smock Alley’’), 179 Theatron, 10

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Index The´re´se Raquin (Zola), 491 ‘‘Thesis plays,’’ 198 Thesmophoriazusae (Aristophanes), 10 Thespis, 6 They Shall Not Die (Wexley), 500 TwentyThe 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Finn), 363 Thirty Tyrants, 16–17 This Lime Tree Bower (McPherson), 304 Thomas, Jonathan, 476 Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury (Williams), 319 Thompson, Judith, 134 Thompson, Paul, 133–134 Thornton, Weldon, 183 Thought (Andreyev), 151 The Three Penny Opera (Weill), 360 The Three Sisters (Chekhov), 245–253 passim, 255, 311, 411, 495–496 Three Tall Women (Albee), 477, 478–479, 483 three unities of action, time and place, 69, 71, 162–163 Thyestes (Seneca), 27 Tiberius, Emperor of Rome, 28 Tieck, Ludwig, 156 Time and the Conways (Priestley), 499 The Time of Your Life (Saroyan), 515 Times Square, 358 The Timetables of History (Grun), 530 The Tiny Closet (Inge), 338 ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (Ford), 44 Tit-Coq (Ge´linas), 127 Tite et Be´re´nice (Corneille), 62 Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare), 45 To Be Young, Gifted and Black (Hansberry), 297 Todi, Jacopone de, 188 To Damascus (Strindberg), 266, 426 The Toilet (Baraka), 339 Toller, Ernst, 429–430, 432, 433, 434, 435 Tomaszuk, Piotr, 237 Tommy (The Who), 327, 470 Too Clever by Half (Ostrovsky), 493–494 Top Girls (Churchill), 421

Topol, Josef, 149 Torberg, Friedrich, 148 Torch Song Trilogy (Fierstein), 340 Toronto, Canada, 128, 130, 133–136, 137, 139, 151 Toronto Free Theatre, 135 Toronto Workshop Productions, 133–134 Torquato Tasso (Goethe), 155 Torrence, Ridgely, 320–323, 326 Torres Naharro, Bartolome´ de, 278 A Touch of Brightness (Sharma), 164, 172 Touchstone, 136 Tourneur, Cyril, 45 Towards a Poor Theatre (Grotowski), 554 The Towneley plays, 86–87, 316, 328 Townshend, Pete, 470. See also The Who Tragedies: Baroque, 156; characteristics and components of, 55, 397, 521–523; comedies vs., 412–413; definitions of, 393, 395–396, 415–416, 486–487; within English Renaissance plays, 38– 40, 41, 44–45; of French neoclassical drama, 53, 55–56, 58–64; Greek tradition of, 5–6, 7–8, 9, 10, 12–15, 521, 522; grotesque, 233, 235–236, 285, 427–428, 449; of Italian drama, 194, 196, 197, 198; morality plays as, 93; of Polish Theater, 214–216, 222; Roman drama, 20, 26–28; within the theater of the absurd, 422; ‘‘white tragedy,’’ 220; women as characters within, 45 The Tragedy of Mariam, The Fair Queen of Jewry (Cary), 45 Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea (Rojas), 277 tragicomedies: of Beckett, 410; characteristics of, 43–44, 523; of Chekhov, 410, 496; of French Neoclassical drama, 56–58; of German drama, 156; of Italian Renaissance, 194–195; overview of, 409–411; of Shakespeare, 41, 43–44 Traite´ du poe¨me e´pique (Le Bossu), 69 ‘‘transference’’ within gay drama, 338–339

Index Transfiguration (Toller), 429–430, 432 Translations (Friel), 184 Translations (Frield), 185 The Trap (Rozewicz), 234 Travesties (Stoppard), 516 Treadwell, Sophie, 435–436 Tremblay, Michel, 129, 132, 138, 139 The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek (Wallace), 351–352, 355 Trial by Jury (Gilbert and Sullivan), 420 The Trial of Jesus (Masefield), 318 The Trial of Sacrates (Patrick), 340 Triana, Jose´, 204 tricksters as stock characters, 394–395. See also stock figures Trifles (Glaspell), 500 Trinity College, Dublin, 178 The Trip to Bountiful (Foote), 274, 308–309 Trissino, Giangiorgio, 193, 194 The Triumph of Minerva, 240 Troepolskaia, Tatiana, 240 Troilus and Cressida (Shakespeare), 41 Troilus and Criseyde (Chaucer), 83 Trojanowska, Tamara, 237 Trojan War, 11–12 Trojan Women (Europides), 14, 18 trompe l’oeil, 55 tropes, 187–188 Troupe de Monsieur, 65 troupes. See theaters and playhouses; specific companies by name Trumpet in The Land, 369 Tsefal and Prokris (Sumarokov), 240 T-shirts (Patrick), 340 Tudor Dynasty, 33, 34 Tuileries Palace, 49 Tulsa, Oklahoma, 367 Tunooniq, 136 Turandot (Gozzi), 197 Turgenev, Ivan, 494–495 Twelfth Night (Shakespeare), 41, 396, 404–407, 522, 556 The Twisting of The Rope (Hyde), 180 Two Theatres (Szaniawski), 231

Two Thieves and a Savior, 328 Tyl, Josef Kajeta´n, 144 Tynan, Kenneth, 149, 422 Tzara, Tristan, 382, 383, 387 Uboh y´ vrah (Kohout), 151 Ubu Roi (Jarry), 387, 408 Ukraine, 243 Ulster Literary Theatre, 180 ‘‘The Umbilicus of Limbo’’ (Artaud), 448 Umbrian ascetics, 188 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Field), 270 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 270 Uncle Vanya (Chekhov), 245, 247– 252passim, 255, 394, 410, 495–496 The Undivine Comedy (Krasinski), 218– 219, 229, 230–231, 236 The Unheroic North (Denison), 128 Unidentified Human Remains and the True Nature of Love (Fraser), 137 United Farm Workers, 423 United Kingdom. See English drama United Scenic Artists Association, 535 United States. See American drama University of Chile, 203 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), 372 ‘‘university wits,’’ 38 Unruh, Fritz von, 430 Un-tied States (Patrick), 340 Untold Decades (Patrick), 340 Unto These Hills (Davis), 370–371, 373 Urban IV, Pope, 86 Urbino court, 192 Urceus, Codrus, 190 ‘‘Ursonate’’ (Schwitters), 386 Uruguay, 202. See also Latin American drama Uruguayan Theater, 206. See also Latin American drama The Usefulness of The Stage (Dennis), 123 Usigli, Rodolfo, 203 Utah Shakespearean Festival, 552 Utopia (More), 32

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Index V+W (Voskovec and Werich), 147–148, 150 Vadim of Novgorod (Kniazhnin), 242 Valdes, Luis, 207 Valenciennes, France, 549 Valenciennes Passion Play, 549 Valentina, 536–537 Valentine’s Day (Foote), 310 Valla, Giorgio, 194 Valle-Incla´n, Ramo´n Marı´a del, 285 Valley Stream, New York, 383 Van Biema, David, 88 Vancouver theaters and companies, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140 Vander, Carol, 303 Varisco, Robert A., 388 Vassa Zheleznova (Gorky), 497 Vazlav (Mrozek), 236 Vega, Lope de, 278–279 Veidt, Conrad, 435 Velbloud uchem jehly (Langer), 147 Veltrusky´, 142 Venezuela, 206. See also Latin American drama Vengeance (Fredro), 221–222 Venice, Italy, 197 Verdi, Giuseppe, 198 ‘‘Verfremdungseffekt,’’ 159 Verga, Giovanni, 198–199 The Verge (Glaspell), 436 Vergerio, Pier Paolo, 189–190 verisimilitude, 58, 61, 64, 67, 69, 417 Verma, Surendra, 170, 172 Vernisa´zˇ (Havel), 151 Very Good Eddie (Kern), 358 Veselohra na mosteˇ (Klicpera), 144 Vest Pocket Revue (V+W), 147–148 vice characters, 36–37, 40, 41 Vicente, Gil, 276–277, 278 Victor or Power to the Children (Vitrac), 512 Vienna, Austria, 143 A View From The Bridge (Miller), 339 Villians, 36–37 Villiers, George, 105–111

violence: within Greek drama, 5, 14–15; In-Yer-Face theatre, 440–441, 444–447; neo-Jacobean movement, 449–450; within Roman drama, 5 Violet (Tesori), 364 Virgil, 18, 188 ‘‘Visitation of the grave’’ drama, 209–210 visual effects, 57, 97. See also theaters and playhouses Vitrac, Roger, 387, 512 Voaden, Herman, 129 Vogel, Paula, 352–353, 355 Voice and Speech Trainers Association, 560 voice coaching, 558–560. See also dialogue Volkov, Fedor, 240 Volpone (Jonson), 42, 398–399, 418 Voltaire, 197 Vor Sonnenaufgang (Hauptmann), 157 The Vortex (Coward), 420–421 Voskovec, Jirˇ´ı, 147–148, 150 The Voysey Inheritance (Granville-Barker), 73, 539 Vrchlicky´, Jaroslav, 145 The Vultures (Tendulkar), 170, 171 Vyrozumeˇnı´ (Havel), 150 Wagner, Richard, 154 Wagons as stages, 89–90, 93, 315–316, 549 Waiting for Godot (Beckett): as archetypical absurdist drama, 74–75, 76, 77, 183–184; Beckett on genre of, 77; FST production of, 555; metaphorical time travel within, 168; ‘‘pointlessness’’ of, 454–455; as tragiccomedy, 523; verbal energy within, 454 The Waiting Room (Gupta), 171–172 Wakefield Cycle (Rose), 328 The Wakefield plays, 86–87, 88, 316, 416, 549 Walker, George F., 137, 138, 139 Wallace, Deborah, 439 Wallace, Naomi, 350–352, 355

Index Wallenstein (Schiller), 155 Waller, Fats, 363 Walton, Tony, 537 Ward, Douglas Turner, 298–299 Ward, Theodore, 501 The War Plays (Bond), 438 The Warrior’s Barrow (Ibsen), 258 Warsaw, Poland, 214, 225–226, 231 Warsaw Uprising, 231 Washington Square Players, 544 Wasserstein, Wendy, 350 Waste (Granville-Barker), 73, 539 Watch on The Rhine (Hellman), 272 The Water Hen (Witkacy), 229–230, 512– 513 Waters, John, 364 Waters of the Moon (Hunter), 499 Watson, Charles, 373, 374 The Way of the World (Congreve), 400– 401, 402, 408 The Weavers (Hauptmann), 491, 499 Webber, Andrew Lloyd, 137, 326–327, 361, 363, 470 Webster, John, 44, 45 The Wedding (Wyspianski), 213, 224– 225, 236 Wedekind, Frank, 427–428 Wednesday Night (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), 129–130 Weichert, Richard, 433–434 Weill, Kurt, 158, 360 Weiss, Peter, 159, 448 Wellman, Mac, 518 Wells are Everywhere (Karpowicz), 235 Werburgh Street Theatre, 178–179 Werfel, Franz, 435 Werich, Jan, 147–148, 150 Wesker, Arnold, 452, 485, 499 West, Mae, 333–334 West End Theaters, 73 Westminster Abbey cloister, 318 West of Suez (Osborne), 499 West Side Story (Bernstein), 362, 464, 468, 469 Wexley, John, 500

Wharton, Texas, 309 ‘‘What is our life?’’ (Ralegh), 31 What Price Glory? (Anderson and Stallings), 500 What the Butler Saw (Orton), 408, 409 When Harry Met Sally (film), 404 When One will Knock at The Door (Karpowicz), 235 When We Dead Awaken (Ibsen), 265 Where There’s A Will (Dattani), 171–172, 173 ‘‘Which Theatre is The Absurd One’’ (Albee), 77 Whiligig (Wellman), 518 Whirlpool (Bhagat), 163, 168 A Whistle in the Dark (Murphy), 185 White, Miles, 536 Whitehorse, Canada, 136 White Marriage (Rozewicz), 516 White Mountain, 143 ‘‘white tragedy,’’ 220 Whiting, Leonard, 468–469 The Who, 327, 470 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee), 338–339, 411, 476, 477, 478, 482 Why All This Bloodshed? (Bhattacharya), 173 Wicked (Schwartz), 363 Wickham, Glynne, 328 Wiene, Robert, 435 The Wife’s Excuse (Southerne), 487–488 Wilbur, Richard, 529 Wildcat (Colemand and Leigh), 362 The Wild Duck (Ibsen), 265, 490 Wilde, Oscar, 72–73, 180, 317, 333, 401, 412, 420 Wilder, Thornton, 146–147, 157, 334 Wildgans, Anton, 430 The Wild Party (LaChiusa), 364 Wiles, Timothy, 456 Wiley, W.L., 49 Wilhelm, C., 534 William of Orange, 96, 121 Williams, Bert, 358 Williams, Charles, 319

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Index Williams, Tennessee, 76, 77, 272–273, 334–338, 339, 437, 502 The Will Rogers Follies (Comden and Green), 362 Willson, Meredith, 361 Wilson, August, 300–301, 423 Wilson, Edward, 278 Wilson, Lanford, 340 Wilson, Robert, 517 Wilson, Sandy, 361 Wilson, Snoo, 516–517 Wine in The Wilderness (Childress), 299 Winnipeg, Canada, 136 The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare), 41, 44, 45, 142 The Witch in Edmondton, 40 Wit (Edson), 542 Withington, Robert, 325 Witkiewicz, Stanislaw Ignacy (‘‘Witkacy’’), 228–230, 236, 512–514, 516 The Witnesses (Rozewicz), 234 Wittman, Scott, 364 Wittop, Freddy, 536, 537 The Wizard of Oz (Arlen and Harburg), 360 Woe From Wit (Griboedov), 242 Wojtyla, Karol, 220, 233 Wolfe, George, 300–301 Wolfe, Kenneth M., 320 Wolves of the Night (Rittner), 227 Woman in Mind (Ayckbourn), 500 The Woman in White (Webber), 363 A Woman Killed with Kindness (Heywood), 40 A Woman of No Importance (Wilde), 420 women as actresses and characters, 350– 356; within biblical drama, 329; within British comedy, 420; in Czech drama, 144–145; during English Renaissance, 34, 40, 45, 46; during French neoclassical period, 49; gender as fluid term, 356; within German drama, 160; within Greek drama, 10, 14, 15, 16; within Indian drama, 172–174; within

Italy, 196; within Latin American theater, 206; marriage as domain of the farce, 408–409; in mystery plays, 90; Norman, 353–355; during Restoration period, 97, 102–103, 113–120, 121– 122; within Roman drama, 23; of Shakespeare’s plays, 45; Vogel, 352– 353; of Wallace, 350–352, 355. See also feminist drama women as playwrights, 45, 129, 139, 144, 206, 350–356. See also specific playwrights by name Women of the Ecclesia (Aristophanes), 17 Wonderful Town (Comden and Green), 362 The Wooden Cart (Sharma), 169, 171 Woolf, Henry, 476 Woolf, Virginia, 45 The Word (Munk), 266 Works (Jonson), 42 The World of Apu (Ray), 162 Worth, Irene, 130 The Would-Be Gentleman (Molie`re), 406 Woyzeck (Bu¨chner), 156–157, 160 Wright, Richard, 296 Wright, Robert, 361 Writers. See playwrights ‘‘Writing for Myself’’ (Pinter), 457–458 Wycherley, William, 103, 111–120, 121– 122, 393–394, 402, 418 Wyspianski, Stanislaw, 213, 223–227, 230–231, 236 Yarmolinsky, Avrahm, 256 n.1 Yeats, W.B. (William Butler), 30, 180– 184, 312, 317, 387, 471 Yiddish Theater, 423 The York cycle, 86, 89–90, 316, 416 You Can’t Take It With You (Kauffman and Hart), 422 You Never Can Tell (Shaw), 406 Your Friends and Neighbors (LaBute), 308 You Will Not Be Killing (Brandstaetter), 233 Yuyachkani, 205

Index Zablocki, Franciszek Ksawery, 213, 221 Zahradny´´ slavnost (Havel), 150 Zalewski, Daniel, 307 Zannis, 195–196 Zapolska, Gabriela, 222 The Zeal of Thy House (Sayers), 319 Zeffirelli, Franco, 468–469 Zeyer, Julius, 145 ˇ apek and C ˇ apek), 146 Ze zivota hmyzu (C Zhdanov, Andrey, 497 Ziegfeld, Florenz, 358, 359

Zink, Christopher, 375 Zinn, David, 536 Zipprodt, Patricia, 536 Zola, Emile, 157, 265, 490–491, 505 The Zoo Story (Albee), 77, 476 Zorrilla, Jose´, 282–283 Zuber, Catherine, 536 Zuckmayer, Carl, 157–158 Zurich, 383 Zurich, Switzerland, 381 The Zykovs (Gorky), 496–497

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About the Editor and Contributors

EDITOR Kimball King has authored or edited thirteen books on American literature and on contemporary British and American Drama. He is Adjunct Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

CONTRIBUTORS Andrew Ade is Assistant Professor of English at Westminster College in Pennsylvania. His teaching and research interests include narratology, world drama, theory of drama, and theater history and performance. Veronika Ambros is an Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto. She has written Kohout und die Metamorphosen des Sozialistischen Realismus (1933), as well as many chapters in books. She also has written about Prague’s experimental stage and Czech women writers. Milly S. Barranger, Alumni Distinguished Professor Emerita of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is an author, producer, and educator. She has written fifteen books on theater and drama, including Margaret Webster: A Life in the Theater, Understanding Plays, Theatre: A Way of Seeing, and Theatre: Past and Present. She is the author of books on theater history and dramatic criticism, reference works, and play anthologies. An earlier version of this essay on theatrical space appeared in the fifth edition of Barranger’s Theatre: A Way of Seeing (2002).

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About the Editor and Contributors Sarah Bay-Cheng is an assistant professor of theater and media studies at the University at Buffalo/SUNY, pursuing research in avant-garde theater and film, modernism, and intermedia performance. She is the author of Mama Dada: Gertrude Stein’s Avant-Garde Theater (2004) and is currently working on an anthology of modernist drama. Jeffrey T. Bersett is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Film Studies at Westminster College in Pennsylvania. He has written on Spanish drama and culture, most notably in his study of theatrical appropriations of Jose´ Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio. Bersett is also the author of The Baker from Madrigal, a play adapted from Zorrilla’s Traidor, inconfeso y ma´rtir. Karen Blansfield teaches at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She edited the student Methuen edition of Glengarry Glen Ross. She has published articles in several major journals including South Atlantic Review, Journal of American Drama & Theatre, and Studies in American Humor. Miriam M. Chirico is Associate Professor of English Literature at Eastern Connecticut State University, with a specialty in twentieth century drama. She has written on G.B. Shaw, Wendy Wasserstein, and John Leguizamo among other comic playwrights. Reade Dornan is an Associate Professor of English at Michigan State University. She has written widely on contemporary theater—Caryl Churchill, Haruki Murakami, Omaha Magic Theatre, African American playwrights. Her books are Arnold Wesker Revisited and Arnold Wesker: A Casebook. Martha Greene Eads is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Language and Literature Department at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. Her essays on drama and fiction have appeared in Christianity and Literature, The Cresset, Modern Drama, and Theology. Katherine Egerton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Theatre, and Speech Communication at Berea College. Her work in Scandinavian Studies has focused on Henrik Ibsen and his influence on contemporary British and American playwrights. She is currently writing a book on the late plays of Arthur Miller. Julie Fishell teaches acting and directing in the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she received the Tanner Award for Teaching Excellence. Professor Fishell is also a resident company

About the Editor and Contributors member of PlayMakers Repertory Company and is a graduate of The Juilliard Drama Division where she was awarded the Michel and Suria Saint-Denis Prize. She is a featured author in Early Gifts: Recognizing and Nurturing Children’s Talents. James Fisher, Professor and Theatre Head, Department of Theatre, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, is the author of four books. He has held several research fellowships and has published articles and reviews in numerous periodicals. He edits The Puppetry Yearbook and he is book review editor of the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Luc Gilleman teaches Modern Drama in the English Department and the Comparative Literature program at Smith College. He is the author of John Osborne: Vituperative Artist ( 2002). Artur Grabowski is Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University and a visiting professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He teaches Modern Polish and Comparative Literature and theater, Poetics and Creative Writing. He has published four books of poetry, a collection of plays, literary essays on European Modernism as well as numerous articles on literature and theater theory. Robert F. Gross teaches drama at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He has published books and articles on a variety of modern playwrights, from Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg to A. R. Gurney, Caryl Churchill, John Guare, and Tennessee Williams. Gwendolyn N. Hale is an Assistant Professor of English and the director of the Writing Center at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. She has edited Fountainhead Press’s Core Curriculum Writing Guide and is currently working on an anthology concerning racial passing as it is portrayed in film and text. She is also working with another professor in an effort to publish a critical text on the drama of Naomi Wallace. William Hutchings is a Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is the author of two books on playwright David Storey in addition to numerous essays and reviews on twentieth-century drama and fiction. His most recent book is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: A Reference Guide (Praeger, 2005). Eszter A. Julian assists for the Technical Director at Temple Theatre in Sanford, North Carolina, and recently graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of

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About the Editor and Contributors North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her most recent accomplishment was assistant stage managing Theatre Or’s production of Hard Love at Victory Gardens in Chicago. Edward Donald Kennedy is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His publications include Chronicles and other Historical Writing (vol. 8 of A Manual of the Writings in Middle English), King Arthur: A Casebook (Garland, 1996: rep. Routledge, 2002), and numerous articles and reviews, primarily on Arthurian subjects and medieval chronicles. He is currently collaborating on an edition of short Scottish chronicles and serving as subject editor for English and Scottish chronicles for the forthcoming Brill Encyclopedia of the Medieval Chronicle. He is editor of Studies in Philology. William Kerwin is an associate professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he teaches Renaissance literature and Irish studies. He is the editor of Brian Friel: A Casebook (Garland, 1997) and Beyond the Body: The Boundaries of Medicine and English Renaissance Drama (University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), and is currently writing a book about English Renaissance satire and urban culture. Gary Konas is an Associate Professor of English at the University of WisconsinLa Crosse. He is editor of Neil Simon: A Casebook (Garland, 1997) and his primary area of research is musical theater. Ralph Lindheim is Professor Emeritus of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto. He is also the editor of The Bulletin of the North American Chekhov Society. Bruce Mann is Dean of Liberal Arts at Northern Virginia Community College (Annandale Campus). For 20 years, he taught drama and modern literature at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. He is the editor of Edward Albee: A Casebook and the author of articles on Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Sam Shepard. Lurana Donnels O’Malley is Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her teaching includes European and American theater history, research methods and directing. Her recent book (Ashgate, 2006) is The Dramatic Works of Catherine the Great: Theatre and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Bobbi Owen is Professor of Dramatic Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has written widely about theatrical designers, including

About the Editor and Contributors hundreds of articles and five books, most recently, The Designs of Willa Kim (New York: 2003). Penelope Prentice is Professor Emeritus from D’Youville College. She has had a dozen plays performed worldwide including Thriller, Collector of Beautiful Men, Lady and the Cowboy, Transformational Country Dances, Love Letter to a Friend, and most recently, Love Play. She is the recipient of an Edward Albee Fellowship and a MacDowell Fellowship for playwriting, and she was awarded New York Foundation of the Arts Sponsorships for Thriller and Loveplay. Her books include The Pinter Ethic: The Erotic Aesthetic. ‘‘Original Light,’’ poetry from her book Capturing the Light, set to music by composer Eric Ewazen, premiered at the Julliard at Lincoln Center. Bonnie N. Raphael is the resident voice, speech, text and dialect coach for PlayMaker’s Repertory Theatre in Chapel Hill. As a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she teaches voice, speech, text and dialects for graduate theater students enrolled in the Professional Actor Training Program. She is one of the founders of VASTA, the Voice and Speech Trainers Association. Ennio Italo Rao is Associate Professor of Italian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His specializations are the Italian Renaissance and Dialectology. He has published mainly on the literature of the fifteenth-century Humanities, particularly their invectives. Brett M. Rogers is Franklin Postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Department of Classics at the University of Georgia. He is currently working on his first book, a study of representations of teaching and learning in archaic and classical Greek poetry, in which he seeks to explain why tyrants talk like teachers in Greek drama. He also teaches and lectures on the ancient novel and on classical mythology in relation to intellectual history, literary theory and modern media. Richard Rankin Russell teaches English and Irish Literature at Baylor University in Texas. He has published essays in journals such as Modern Drama, Journal of Modern Literature, and Eire-Ireland, and his edited collection of essays by various hands on the Irish playwright Martin McDonagh will be published by Routledge in 2007. Kay E.B. Ruth is an assistant professor at Wake Technical College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Her Web site on ‘‘The Harlem Renaissance,’’ created while she was a teaching assistant in an American literature survey course at the University of North Carolina, has been adapted by major universities on both coasts of the United States.

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About the Editor and Contributors Christoph E. Schweitzer is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. His book Men Viewing Women as Art Objects: Studies in German Literature was published in 1998. He has edited many volumes of critical writing and published extensively in scholarly journals. Catherine Seltzer is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. She is currently completing a critical study of southern author Elizabeth Spencer. Sitanshi Talati-Parikh is a writer and columnist currently living in Mumbai, India. She graduated with honors in English Literature from Mumbai University (India). While living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, she researched existentialism and popular culture and she is currently involved in the film industry, children’s literature, and entrepreneurial ventures. John M. Ware is assistant professor of English at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. In addition to Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, his areas of interest include early modern lexicography and early modern legal history. He is currently researching seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel narratives in which writers draw conclusions about Scottish culture based on landscape. Jerry Wasserman is an actor, critic, and Professor of English and Theatre at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. His two-volume Modern Canadian Plays (2001) is in its 4th edition. Recent publications include Theatre and Autobiography: Writing and Performing Lives in Theory and Practice (2005), co-edited with Sherrill Grace, and Spectacle of Empire: Mark Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France (2006). Gerald C. Wood is Professor of English, Chair of the English Department, and Dean of Humanities at Carson-Newman College, where he also serves as film editor of Nua: Studies in Contemporary Irish Writing. He edited a collection of one-act plays on Horton Foote for Southern Methodist University Press (1989), the Garland casebook on Foote (1998) and Neil LaBute: A Casebook (Routledge, 2006). He has written the critical studies Horton Foote and the Theater of Intimacy (LSU, 1999) and Conor McPherson: Imagining Mischief (Liffey Press, Dublin, Ireland, 2003). George Woodyard is professor emeritus of Spanish American Literature at the University of Kansas. He has published various anthologies and editions on Latin American theater and continues to serve as editor of the Latin American Theatre Review, the journal he founded in 1967.