Transcript Slide 1

Chapter 5 – Theatrical Writing:
Perspectives and Forms
If art reflects life it does so
with special mirrors.
—Bertolt Brecht
Chapter Summary
• Playwrights use a variety of dramatic forms to express
their understanding of human experience.
• Tragedy and comedy are the oldest and most familiar
forms, but there are many other ways to classify plays
and to label the playwright’s vision—the way he or she
perceives life in theatrical terms.
Drama’s Perspectives
• Drama’s forms fall into several categories:
– Tragedy
– Comedy
– Tragicomedy
– Melodrama
– Farce
– Epic
– Absurd
Drama’s Perspectives
• Dramatic forms reflect ways of understanding human
experience.
• Each form provides clues as to how the play should be
understood.
Tragedy
• More than an unhappy ending:
– Makes a statement about human frailty
• Well-known tragedies:
– Oedipus the King, Sophocles
– Medea, Euripides
– Hamlet, Shakespeare
– Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen
– Death of A Salesman, Arthur Miller
– Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams
Tragedy
• Tragic hero:
– Chooses opposition rather than compromise
– Freely chooses his or her fate
– Inevitably experiences a fall (a transition from
happiness to pain)
– Asserts will and intellect against imperfect world
• Tragic realization:
– Usually takes two forms:
• Despite suffering and calamity, order exists.
• In a random and indifferent universe, the hero’s
struggle is admirable.
Tragedy
• Aristotle on tragedy:
– The Poetics (c. 335-323 BC)
– Tragedy “an imitation of an action”
– Tragic hero of good character (but not too good)
– Hero’s fall brought about by some flaw or error
– Inspires pity and fear, which leads to catharsis
(purging of emotion)
Tragedy
• Euripides’ Medea:
– Medea wants revenge on husband, Jason, who has
left her and married another woman.
– She murders Jason’s new wife and father-in-law.
– Wishing to completely ruin Jason, Medea murders
their two sons and escapes to Athens.
Tragedy
• Euripides’ Medea:
– Depicts unreliable world in which nothing and no one
may be counted upon:
. . . What we thought
Is not confirmed and what we thought not God
Contrives. And so it happens in this story.
—Euripides, Medea
Comedy
• The comic playwright is interested in society:
– Social values
– People as social beings
– How to live in society
• Deviation and comedy:
– Unlike in tragedy, deviation from social expectations is
scorned.
– Individual will is a threat to social order.
– Harmony is the central value.
Comedy
Differences between Comedy and Tragedy
Tragedy
Comedy
Individual
Death
Error
Suffering
Pain
Separation
Inflexible
Defeat
Society
Endurance
Folly
Joy
Pleasure
Union/Reunion
Flexible
Survival
Comedy
• Comedic vision:
– Sanity, reason, moderation
– Usually ends in a celebration of life and union:
• Wedding
• Dance
• Banquet
– Shakespeare: “All’s well that ends well”
Comedy
• Moliere’s Tartuffe:
– Disguised as a priest, Tartuffe ingratiates himself to
the merchant Orgon and his mother, who take him in.
– All but Orgon and his mother recognize Tartuffe as a
fake.
– Orgon offers Tartuffe his daughter’s hand in marriage.
– When Tartuffe attempts to seduce Elmire, Orgon’s
wife, she vows to expose his depravity.
– By the time he is found out, Tartuffe throws the family
out of the house and attempts to have them arrested.
– Tartuffe is arrested instead and taken to prison.
Comedy
• Moliere’s Tartuffe:
– Play ends with resolution of family conflicts.
– The society at the end of the play is freer and less
rigid than at the beginning.
• Comic vision:
– Human error stems from folly.
– Conflict will end in resolution, for the better of society.
Tragicomedy
• Traditional tragicomedy:
– Mixed dramatic form
– Serious or potentially tragic work that ends well
– Shakespeare’s tragicomedies:
• All’s Well that Ends Well
• Winter’s Tale
• Modern tragicomedy:
– Play with mixed moods (Chekhov’s “quiet
desperation”)
– Endings indeterminate—neither tragic nor comic
Tragicomedy
• Examples of modern tragicomedy:
– Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov:
• Characters endure unfulfilling marriage, work,
family.
• Only option is survival: “We’ve got to live.”
Tragicomedy
(c) Robbie Jack/ CORBIS
• Examples of modern tragicomedy:
– Waiting for Godot, Samuel
Beckett:
• Characters wait for someone
who never arrives.
• Humor and energy mixed with
anguish and despair.
• Characters laugh at their plight
without being able to change it.
Waiting for Godot
Tragicomedy
• Modern “American” tragicomedy:
– Depicts characters who are amusing and serious
without being foolish or superficial
– Angels in America, Tony Kushner:
• Transcends indeterminate endings typical of
modern tragicomedy
• Replaces despair with idea of social change
Melodrama
• Combination of music and drama in which dialogue is
delivered over musical background:
– Pygmalion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• 19th century melodrama:
– Serious play
– Usually about a character who faces death or ruin at
the hands of a villain
– Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Melodrama
• Melodramatic vision:
– Struggles are external, not internal.
– Hero triumphs when pushed to the extreme.
– Endings clear-cut, unambiguous.
– Melodrama represents the way we see the world
most of the time:
• Failures attributed to external factors, faults of
others
Farce
• Depends on skillfully exploited situation, not character
development (comedy of situation)
• Presents life as mechanical, aggressive, and
coincidental
• Characters:
– Two-dimensional: broad outlines
– Reminder that fools and impostors exist alongside the
noble and virtuous
• “Extreme exaggeration of parody” (Eugene Ionesco)
Farce
• The “psychology” of farce (Eric Bentley):
– Allows us to experience social taboos without
consequence:
• Violence without harm
• Adultery without consequence
• Brutality without reprisal
• Aggression without risk
– Appeals to audience’s secret thoughts and innermost
fantasies
– Way for audience to indulge antisocial fantasies
Farce
• Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs:
– An elderly man and woman frantically fill empty stage
with chairs.
– They are preparing for the arrival of an Orator.
– When the Orator arrives, the couple hurl themselves
out of windows to their deaths.
– Only then does the audience learn that the Orator is
mute.
• Interpretation:
– Ionesco’s way of portraying world without meaning
Bertolt Brecht: Epic Theatre
• Reaction against theatrical Western traditions
• Wanted to represent historical process in theatre:
– Thought of stage as platform for debate of political
and social issues
– Rejected “well made” play:
• Epic theatre episodic and linear (like history)
• Characters:
– Represent individuals and collective beings:
• Specific and allegorical at the same time
– Social function key to identity, characterization
Bertolt Brecht: Epic Theatre
• Epic theatre as eyewitness account:
– Actors should differentiate from characters.
– Actor/eyewitness never becomes character/victim.
– Actors are free to comment on characters.
• The alienation effect:
– Jarring audience out of sympathetic feelings for
characters
– Encourages audience to be objective, to think
Absurdist Theatre
• Presents irrational situations without comment or
judgment
• Characteristics:
– Unrecognizable plots
– Mechanical characters
– Incoherent dialogue
– Dream/nightmare scenarios
• Gives audience a sense of being in an absurd universe
Absurdist Theatre
• Eugene Ionesco:
– “[The absurd] is anything without a goal . . . When
man is cut off from his religious or metaphysical roots,
he is lost; all his struggles become senseless futile
and oppressive.”
– “Meaning” simply what happens onstage
– Plays:
• The Chairs
• The Bald Soprano
• The Rhinoceros
Absurdist Theatre
• The “American” absurd:
– Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story:
• Introduced the absurd to American playwriting
Core Concepts
• Dramatic forms reflect the playwright’s vision and
sentiments about the world.
• Genres are theatrical ways of labeling a playwright’s
view of the world’s substance, shape, and meaning.