Chapter 17

____ was another famous realistic playwright. After growing up mostly in poverty, Chekhov put himself through medical school and set up free clinics in provincial Russia to help the poor. By the time he was in his mid-twenties he was the primary support for his family, but he still found time to write over 600 short stories, mostly comedies

Anton Chekhov

One of the most famous surrealists was the French writer and director ____, who studied Asian religions, mysticism, and ancient cultures; he spent part of his life with the Tarahumara Indians, an indigenous people of northwest Mexico

Antonin Artaud

What does avant-garde mean?

Any work of art that is experimental, innovative, or unconventional

____ was a German poet, director, and playwright who also challenged traditional ideas about theatre. In 1929, after watching policemen shoot unarmed civilians during a protest, Brecht became a communist. Four years later he was forced to flee Germany because of his outspoken criticism of Hitler

Bertolt Brecht

Explain the alienation effect

The result of techniques to keep the audience aware that what they are witnessing is only a play; used by Bertolt Brecht. Alienation techniques include having the actors address the audience out of character, exposing the lights, removing the proscenium arch and curtains, and having the actors perform on bare platforms or simple sets that are sometimes punctuated with political slogans

Artaud called for a ____, which would agitate the masses, attack the spectators' sensibilities, and purge people of their destructive tendencies

Theatre of Cruelty

What led to the birth of realism?

There was a call for sets to be more "genuine," acting to be more "honest," and dialogue to be modeled after everyday speech. But this call for reality quickly became more than a desire to mirror the world; it became a hunger to uncover the basic forces of human nature and to show people as they really are

Most of Chekhov's characters are decent and sensitive people, who dream of improving themselves, but haven't the vaguest idea of how to do it. He called his plays "comedies," which...

has led to great debates in the theatre community. How can plays about stagnant and helpless people be considered funny?

Whereas Ibsen wrote grim dramas that directly confronted society, George Bernard Shaw wrote what might be called ____, cerebral, socially relevant plays that had an intellectual scope so vast they forced audiences to reassess their values

high comedies

In 1895 Wilde wrote his most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest. But just a few months later, Wilde's plays were considered unproduceable, because he had been publicly humiliated and was facing a two-year prison term:

his crime was his sexuality (he was gay)

In the theatre, an ____ is a set of ideas about the style, purpose, and scale of a production

ism

Existentialists feel that we can escape from the chaos of the world only by...

making significant decisions, taking action, and accepting complete responsibility, without excuses, for our actions

Among the isms that followed symbolism were:

1. Expressionism 2. Dadaism 3. Surrealism 4. Absurdism

Yet plenty of traditional realistic plays in post-World War II America also attacked the system and attempted to put real life on stage. Because realistic plays usually convey a social message, many activist writers used this style during the civil rights movement. One of the most famous plays of this period was Lorraine Hansberry's ____, a living-room drama about three generations of an African American family who struggle against economic, social, and political prejudices as well as self-doubt

A Raisin in the Sun

What is symbolism?

A design style or theatre genre in which a certain iece of scenery, a costume, or light represent the essence of the entire environment

What is surrealism?

A genre of theatre that emphasizes the subconscious realities of the character, usually through design, and often includes random sets with dreamlike qualities

What is dadaism?

A movement that was ignited by the atrocities of World War I and gained fame through staged performances designed to demonstrate the meaninglessness of life

What are problem plays?

A play that expresses a social problem so that it can be remedied

What is existentialism?

A post-World War II philosophy that sees humans as being alone in the universe, without God, so they are entirely responsible for their destinies

What is Poetic Realism?

A style of realism that is expressed through lyrical language

What is Realism?

A style of theatre that attempts to seem like life, with authentic-looking sets, "honest" acting, and dialogue that sounds like everyday speech

What is Expressionism?

A style that shows the audience the action of the play through the mind of one character. Instead of seeing photographic reality, the audience sees the character's own emotions and point of view

English naturalist ____ is, of course, famous for his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which states that all the animals on earth evolved from a common ancestry over millions of years and that the primary mechanisms for evolution are environment and natural selection

Charles Darwin

In 1852 the British actor ____ production of Shakespeare's King John had realistic costumes, set, and props that he had researched to make sure they were historically correct.

Charles Kean's

One of the most famous expressionist playwrights is ____. He was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for literature

Eugene O'Neill

____ absurdism holds that human beings are naturally alone, without purpose or mission, in a universe that has no God. The absence of God means that humans have no fixed destiny, but, for the existentialists, this is not a negative, for without a God humans can create their own existences, purpose, and meaning

Existential

____ teaches that humans have free will, but that there are no alibis, no gods to thank, no devils to blame, no original sin to account for our situation and that existence precedes essence

Existentialism

____ started in Germany around 1910 as a reaction to a new kind of painting called Impressionism. Monet, Renoir, Cezanne, and other Impressionist painters were interested in how reality appears to the eye at a particular moment—in other words, a subjective account of an objective perception

Expressionism

Initially, Henrik Ibsen was a realistic playwright (T/F)

False

____ absurdism suggests we are trapped in an irrational universe where even basic communication is impossible

Fatalistic

What is Epic Theatre?

Features plays that have a grand scope, large casts, and cover a long period and a wide range of sometimes unrelated incidents. An innovation by Bertolt Brecht

The Victorian age was a time of rigid morals, inflexible conventions, prudish behavior, and, above all, punctilious good taste. Darwin's ideas on evolution were perverted into "social Darwinism," or socioeconomic "survival of the fittest." It justified a laissez-faire economic system in which profit was a divine right, and the conditions of its victims, the poor and the working class, were of little concern. Soon the working class formed unions and made alliances with liberal intellectuals such as British playwright ____

George Bernard Shaw

In 1885 German inventor ____ constructed the first high-speed internal combustion engine

Gottlieb Daimler

The most famous realistic playwright is ____, often called the father of realism

Henrik Ibsen

____ absurdism highlights the insanity of life in a comical way

Hilarious

After World War II ended, the Cold War began, and the ____ stepped up its work. In 1947 it gained notoriety by investigating alleged communist influence in Hollywood. The Hollywood Ten, a group of producers, directors, and screenwriters who refused to testify about their friends' political beliefs, were found guilty of contempt of Congress and sentenced to prison

House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC)

How did Darwinism affect theatre?

In order to write or portray a realistic character, the playwright or actor had to understand the character's environment and heredity. Whereas Romantic heroes had been a force to be reckoned with—complete, if perhaps simple, beings who knew right from wrong—realistic protagonists were products of their environment, upbringing, and psyche

What is the little theatre movement?

Inexpensive, noncommercial, artistically significant plays in small, out-of-the-way theatres. In the United States, flourished from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s

Perhaps the most renowned playwright of existential absurdism is ____

Jean-Paul Sartre

In 1885, German engineer ____ built the first primitive automobile

Karl Benz

____ became the first black woman playwright to be produced on Broadway

Lorraine Hansberry

The French theatre designer ____ was known for his lifelike sets. He used hand-painted screens and gas-powered lighting effects to stage realistic sunrises and storm clouds. But it is for his invention of the daguerreotype, in 1829, an early form of photography, that he is best known today

Louis Daguerre

One of the first theatres to have box sets was the Olympic Theatre in London, which was managed by actor and singer ____, the first female theatre manager in London. Not only did plays at her theatre have historically accurate costumes and real properties, but her box sets also had working doors, real windows, real trim, and ceilings

Lucy Elizabeth Bartolozzi Vestris

What does Kafkaesque mean

Marked by surreal distortion and senseless danger; a term that comes from the way that Czech writer Franz Kafka depicted the world

The period of realism and naturalism was also a time of important social change. Women's rights became an important issue in Europe and the United States. In England the 1882 ____ abolished a husband's grip on his wife's inheritance, Oxford and Cambridge universities both started colleges for women, divorce laws were changed to allow women more freedom, and there were attempts to make public schooling for boys and girls equitable

Married Women's Property Act

____ often represented the seedy side of life in order to show the audience life as it is rather than as we would like it to be

Naturalism

In 1885, the ____ on Fourth Avenue was the first theatre in the world to be lit with electric lights

New Lyceum

Darwin's ideas not only contradicted the biblical account of Creation, but they also, in many ways, contradicted the...

Newtonian idea of a logical universe set into motion by a great rational creator

Starting in the late 1950s, small theatres had begun to spring up in several Manhattan neighborhoods to put on plays about the issues of the day. These theatres became collectively known as ____

Off Broadway

What is Off Broadway?

Originally, small experimental theatres that sprang up in the late 1950s outside Times Square to put on plays about current issues. They typically have much smaller houses than Broadway theatres

What is Theatre of Cruelty?

Originated by Antonin Artaud, stylized, ritualized performances intended to attack spectators' sensibilities and purge them of destructive tendencies

Irish playwright ____ is famous for such comic plays as Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), and An Ideal Husband (1894). He was quite the character, advocating "art for art's sake" and known for aesthetic idiosyncrasies such as wearing his hair long and often having a huge flower in his lapel. He was also known for his wit

Oscar Wilde

After Darwin equated humans with all other animals, the Viennese psychologist ____ revolutionized ideas about how our animal minds worked. He said that the human unconscious plays a major role in shaping behavior. These unconscious motivations, he said, might be memories from early childhood or traumatic events blocked out of our conscious awareness

Sigmund Freud

What is Off-Off Broadway?

Small, nontraditional, noncommercial theatres located in storefronts, coffeehouses, churches, and other public spaces in the New York City area

What is naturalism?

Sordid realism"; a style of theatrical design and acting whose goal is to imitate real life, including its seamy side. Also called "slice of life" theatre

In 1895, ____, a Swedish scientist, published the first paper on the effect of carbon dioxide on the climate, what would a hundred years later be called global warming and climate change

Svante August Arrhenius

Contributing to the rage for theatrical realism was Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent light bulb in 1879. By 1880 the first electric streetlights were installed in New York City, and not long after there were so many glowing streetlights in the Broadway theatre district that it was nicknamed ____

The Great White Way

Freud wrote numerous books on these topics. One of his most famous texts is ____, in which he analyzes the characters of Oedipus and Hamlet. Freud's deep, detailed analysis of the human mind began to take over literature and the theatre

The Interpretation of Dreams

The birth of modern, realistic acting can be traced to the opening night of Anton Chekhov's ____ on December 17, 1898. The play had been a total disaster when it was first staged two years earlier in St. Petersburg, but Konstantin Stanislavsky (1863-1938) and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko (1859-1943), the co-founders of the Moscow Art Theatre, decided to stage the play with a realistic set, natural staging, and acting characterized by psychological realism

The Seagull

____, one of Bertolt Brecht's best-known plays, incorporates many elements that foster the alienation effect. Political slogans are projected onto the back wall of the set, characters sometimes deliver their lines with their backs to the audience, and songs serve to keep the audience from getting too attached to the characters

The Threepenny Opera

Playwrights who wrote in the Realistic style sought to portray not only events and settings realistically but also characters who reflected the circumstances they were born into (T/F)

True

Surrealist performances were often violent and cruel as they tried to shock the audience into the realization that "normal" realities are arbitrary (T/F)

True

English poet ____ described the "exhilarating experience" of riding in an automobile at the amazing speed of 15 miles per hour

Wilfrid Scawen Blunt

Around 1840, English physicist ____ improved upon Daguerre's daguerreotype and created modern photography

William Fox Talbot

The devastation and genocide of World War II led many playwrights to conclude that humans face a cold, hostile universe and that our existence is futile. Relationships seemed ineffective, language was imprecise, and the traditional structure of plays failed to reflect the ridiculousness and anxiety of a cosmos without cause or fate. They also had no use for characters with detailed motivations that completely and logically explain their actions, because humans act in baffling, contradictory, and unexpected ways. Thus ____ was born

absurdism

Brecht viewed the grand scope of epic theatre as a perfect mechanism to confront the numerous social and political troubles of his day, but was worried that the theatre could also be used to brainwash the masses. Rather than being lulled into the illusion of the play, Brecht wanted his audience to remain alienated from the performance so they could critically consider the play's themes. He called this Verfremdung, or "estrangement," what we refer to today as the ____

alienation effect

With the advent of realism, set design also changed. It now seemed necessary to show how people were directly affected by their environment. Theatres began building sets that authentically replicated a character's surroundings. The forestage, or ____, was used less because electric lights allowed the action to take place behind the proscenium arch, where a realistic setting, often one of the newly invented box sets, could be built

apron

The 1800s were a century of invention and expansion. The telegraph (1844), the phonograph, the telephone (both in 1876), and the jukebox (1889)...

astounded the masses

Soon there were calls for theatre to "re-theatricalize" itself by doing what the camera could not do. Many theatre artists began to reject naturalism and realism, and a variety of new styles began to emerge. Unlike previous periods, when one style dominated for a while and then was replaced by another style, now several styles flourished simultaneously. New perspectives on the human experience led to avant-garde theatrical styles, each with its own systems and theories. The word ____ can describe any artist or work of art that is experimental, innovative, or unconventional

avant-garde

But, unlike the Dadaists, the surrealists tried to reveal the higher reality of the unconscious mind with fantastic imagery and contradictory images. They felt that if the subconscious could...

avoid the conscious mind's control, it would rise to the surface, where it could be used to find truth

In short, Marx's ideas made the theatre of the past seem like frivolous entertainment that purposely...

avoided addressing the problems of a world dominated by a class system

A ____ is a true-to-life interior containing a room or rooms with the ____ removed so that the audience has the feeling of looking in on the characters' private lives

box set, fourth wall

Along with realistic sets, darkened theatres, and themes that questioned society, dramas also had realistic characters, whose speech and manners were much like those of everyday people. Characters onstage did the sorts of things that people do in everyday life. Not only did these characters have specific psychological motivations, but they also...

came from a particular place, which affected what they believed and how they acted. Some playwrights of realism attempted to capture "local color" and regional dialects

Freud theorized that people spend vast amounts of energy forming defense mechanisms to cope with such memories and that these often end in neuroses. He argued that our basic instincts can be controlled only through socialization, yet socialization can...

cause us to suppress natural desires and urges. When such urges are suppressed long enough, they become part of the unconscious mind, which reveals itself through slips of the tongue, jokes, and dreams

Existentialists hold that human beings are naturally alone, without purpose or mission, in a universe that has no God. The absence of God means that humans have no fixed destiny, but, for the existentialists, this is not a negative, for without God humans can...

create their own existences, purpose, and meaning

Like expressionism, ____ and ____ were founded in opposition to realism

dadaism, surrealism

German philosopher and social scientist Karl Marx (1818-1883) founded two of the most influential mass movements in modern history:

democratic socialism and revolutionary communism

An ____ is usually a story, play, or poem that has a large cast, covers a long period, and includes a large number of sometimes unrelated incidents

epic

Bernard Shaw argued that the prime function of playwrights is to...

expose the social and moral evils of their time

It is sometimes useful to view absurdism as loosely divided into three broad categories that often overlap:

fatalist, hilarious, and existentialist

At the end of each world war, the United States, although paranoid about communism and suffering from the deaths of tens of thousands of its sons and daughters, seemed filled with optimism. Unlike most European plays...

most American plays were still realistic

For some, however, realism was not real enough. A few directors, actors, and playwrights began calling for an even more extreme form of realism, an accurate "documentary" of everyday life, including its seamy side. French novelist Émile Zola (1840-1902) named this new "photographic" realism ____, and his phrase "slice of life" is an often-quoted description of it

naturalism

In the United States these new movie theatres were called ____ because they only cost a nickel

nickelodeons

Have you ever become so totally immersed in a play, or movie, or so completely sympathized with a character that during the performance you lost track of time? When you were so acutely immersed, did you stop and think about the political, social, and economic implications of the story? Most likely you did not. Such total immersion, Brecht felt, was dangerous because it...

opens the audience to mindless manipulation. People who are constantly manipulated in a theatre, Brecht said, were also more susceptible to being brainwashed outside the theatre by dictators, corporations, and religions

As plays became more political, playwrights often attached a lengthy preface, appendix, or manifesto to explain the political theme of a play. Some of these realistic plays simply pointed out the social problem without offering a solution. These ____ were based on the idea that before a problem can be solved, society must first understand that the problem exists

problem plays

For Dadaists, life has no purpose, and they confused and antagonized their audiences by...

refusing to adhere to a coherent set of principles, thereby mirroring the madness of the world

Whereas conventional theatre mirrored images of common life, the symbolists searched for truth beyond the physical world. Symbolist drama sought to...

replace the specific and concrete with the suggestive and metaphorical

Existentialists feel that we can escape from the chaos of the world only by making...

significant decisions, taking action, and accepting complete responsibility, without excuses, for our actions

By 1910, there were more than 10,000 nickelodeons in the United States. By 1911, 1,400 legitimate stages in the United States had been converted to movie houses. By 1915, the number of touring theatre companies had dropped from 300 to 100, and...

soon the number fell to less than ten

Naturalistic plays exposed the squalid living conditions of the urban poor and explored such scandalous topics as poverty, venereal disease, and prostitution. This earned naturalism the designation ____

sordid realism

Brecht eliminated the vicarious experience of theatre by using various staging techniques. Sometimes he would have the actors...

step out of character and address the audience directly, or he might expose the theatrical lights and remove the curtains to remind the audience they are in a theatre

With expressionism the artist imposes his own internal state onto the outside world itself; therefore, expressionism is a...

subjective account of a subjective perception

Symbolists argued that the realists' objective observation of the world using the five senses was not the best way to show inner truth. They believed that...

such truths could be hinted at only through symbols

One of the first isms in the rebellion against realism and naturalism was ____

symbolism

By the late 1960s, Off Broadway was becoming a victim of its own success, as actors, designers, and technical unions were demanding better working conditions and higher pay. Soon, production costs grew and therefore plays had to become more commercial and less experimental in order to attract a larger audience. The result was a new wave of even smaller, less expensive, alternative, experimental theatres:

the Off-Off-Broadway movement. These tiny theatres—fewer than a hundred seats—flourished in lofts, basements, coffeehouses, storefronts, cafes, and in any found space that could be adapted for use as a theatre

In 1895 Auguste and Louis Lumiere opened the world's first movie theatre in Paris. Unlike Thomas Edison, who was working on devices that allowed only one person at a time to watch a movie, the Lumieres projected...

the image on a screen, allowing hundreds and later thousands of people to watch

Symbolist theatre did not last long because...

the plays had little plot or action and tended to baffle the audience

Expressionist plays often use deliberate distortion:

walls slanted inward to make the room feel claustrophobic, wallpaper striped like prison bars, or trees having the form of huge strangling hands

Ibsen was impressed by the Duke's revolutionary methods of staging scenes so that they looked real. Afterward, Ibsen set out to...

write realistic plays that would present the audience with ordinary people speaking in everyday language

Influenced by Marx's arguments, playwrights began...

writing realistic stories that spotlighted human oppression