Modern Theatre

1
Chapter 12

• Modern Theatre

2
Western Influence on World Theatre

• Spoken Drama in
• India
• China
• Japan
• The Arab World
• Pre-colonial Africa

3
The Advent of RealismAntecedents

• William Fox Talbot (1800-1877)
• Invented the photographic negative around 1840
• Thomas Edison
• Invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879
• Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
• Wrote about evolution in The Origin of Species in
  1859
• Karl Marx (1818-1883)
• Critiqued capitalism and other aspects of the
  Industrial revolution in Das Kapital in 1867
• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
• Wrote about the complexity of human psychology in
  The Interpretation of Dreams in 1900
• August Strindberg (1849-1912)
• Problem plays

4
Realism in the Modern Theatre

• Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
• Father of Realism
• A Dolls House (1879)
• Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
• Moscow Art Theatre
• The Seagull (1896)
• Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
• The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
• George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
• Pygmalion (1912)
• Box Sets and Fourth Walls
• Olympic Theatre in London

Oscar Wilde
5
Naturalism in the Theatre

• Emile Zola (1840-1902)
• Naturalism as a documentary of everyday life
• Slice of life, or photographic reality
• Maxim Gorky (1868-1936)
• The Lower Depths (1902)
• André Antoine, (1858-1943)
• Theatre Libre
• Comedies rosses

6
Avant-garde Theatre

• Definition
• To be ahead of
• To experiment with
• To break conventional expectations
• To explore new realities

7
Avant-garde TheatreSymbolism/FuturismImpressio
nism/Expressionism

• Symbolism emphasized the suggestive and
  metaphoric over the literal and real
• Futurism glorified power and speed of the
  Industrial revolution
• Impressionism emphasized the subjectivity of
  perception over that of objectivity
• Expressionism used subjective theatrical
  metaphors to create a sense of how a character
  experiences his or her subjective reality
• Elmer Rices (1892-1967) The Adding Machine
  (1923)
• Eugene ONeills (1888-1953) The Hairy Ape (1922)

8
Avant-garde TheatreDadaism and Surrealism

• Dadaism made us of sound poems and nonliteral
  images to underscore the madness of their
  perception of the reality of World War I
• Surrealism sought to portray the fantastic
  images associated with the unconscious mind as a
  way by which to reveal deeper realities
• Theatre of Cruelty
• Antonin Artuad (1896-1948)
• The Theatre and Its Double (1938)

9
Avant-Garde TheatreAbsurdism

• Absurdism
• Fatalist
• Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
• Waiting for Godot (1953)
• Endgame (1957)
• Existentialist
• Jean-Paul Sarte (1905-1980)
• No Exit (1943)
• Hilarious
• Eugene Ionesco (1912-1994)
• The Bald Soprano (1949)
• Rhinoceros (1959)

10
Avant-Garde TheatreEpic Theatre

• Epic Theatre
• Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
• Emphasis on the underlining causes for a story
  rather than the story itself
• Alienation effect distancing the audience from
  theatrical illusion so they can analyze and
  discuss the reasons for what is happening to the
  characters on the stage
• Understands that all art is fundamentally
  political and that the artist and his audience
  share responsibility for that fact of life
• The Three Penny Opera (1928) and Mother Courage
  and Her Children (1941)

11
American Theatre 1945- 1960

• Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
• Death of a Salesman (1949)
• Mixes Realism with Expressionism
• Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
• The Glass Menagerie (1945)
• Poetic realism
• Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)
• A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
• Employs Realism to dramatize the plight of an
  African-American family in Chicago in the 1950s

12
American Theatre in the 1960s

• Little Theatre Movement
• Subscription audience based theatres that
  permitted American to see example of the new
  stagecraft artists from Europe and America
• Off-Broadway
• Staged noncommercial productions of artistically
  important plays in small theatres
• Off-off-Broadway
• Staged noncommercial productions that are often
  experimental in theatres of 99 seats or less
• Happenings
• Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) and the Polish Lab
  Theatre

13
Contemporary TheatreRegional Theatre

• Alley Theatre in Houston
• First permanent professional regional theatre in
  the U.S. founded in 1947 by Margo Jones

• Others include
• Arena Theatre in Washington, D.C.
• Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis
• Actors Theatre of Louisville
• Mark Taper Forum in Los Angles
• Alliance Theatre in Atlanta

14
Contemporary TheatrePerformance Art

• Characteristics
• mixes theatre, visual arts, music, dance, gesture
  and ritual
• Rejects traditional elements of drama such as
  plot, dialogue, characters and setting
• Most interested in conveying a state of being

• Examples of Performance Artists include
• Laurie Anderson
• Tim Miller

15
Contemporary TheatrePolitical and Cultural
Theatre

• David Henry Hwang (b. 1957)
• M. Butterfly (1988)
• Caryl Churchill (b. 1938)
• Cloud Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982)
• David Mamet
• Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Oleanna (1992)
• August Wilson (1945-2005)
• Ma Raineys Black Bottom (1984) to Golf (2005)
• Sam Shepard (b. 1943)
• Buried Child (1978) and Fool for Love (1982)

16
Contemporary TheatreRecent Nobel Prize Winning
Playwrights

• Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
• Dario Fo (Italy)
• Goa Xingjian (China)
• Harold Pinter (England)