Under Construction
“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”
Overview
Since the dawn of Western Civilization, dramatic art on stage has both reflected and profoundly influenced its long, rocky evolution. For the first 2000 years, it was not only the only literary form the illiterate masses knew; it was how they learned their place in the world—as perceived and presented by the wise (or foolish) men (and later women) who wrote the plays and the actors who played the parts.
In that sense—until our current chaos (and except for the Dark Ages)—theatre has always played an integral role in civilized society; right up there with church and horseshoes. Audiences saw plays as often as we go to ball games, for “pleasing” entertainment (before mass media) and something to think about. They had their ups and downs as societies rose and fell, but only once were they abolished altogether.
Even today, even if we’ve never seen a play on stage, we know what they are—something people used to in the old days. We’re subliminally aware of Broadway and our local “little” groups of show-offs and blue-hairs, and we have opinions and attitudes that justify our failure to attend.
When live theatre goes to pot, civilization crumbles.
This page highlights moments when dramatic art had a major impact on the rise of the five chronological (and dramatic) ages of western history, and how it declined and dissipated with their fall. Follow the links for many more examples of how, through all these centuries, drama has been used and abused by church and state to their advantage, and how its own dramatic power moved and educated cardinals and kings as well as all their common people.
Note that these eras all emerge from nowhere, rise to the peaks of their time, and dissipate into the fodder for a revolutionary shift into the next.
Impact on the Ages
While theatre was always with us—its six basic elements the same, its purpose always “to please and instruct”—the way it was presented and received was altered to suit and shape the times. The following annotated outline illustrates the moments in those times when drama changed the course of history.
The Golden Age
Renaissance
In 1345, the Tuscan scholar Petrarch discovered and published a collection of letters by the Roman poet Cicero, which triggered a scholastic interest in ancient culture that spread slowly (over 170 years) to schools all over western Europe, to recall a time when life on earth could be just as good as questionable life hereafter. For his efforts, Petrarch is known as “The Father of Humanism,” and thus of the Renaissance—and Modern Times.
The Rise of Nations
Until the Renaissance, all Christian city-states and kingdoms were subject to the Church of Rome. The rebirth of ancient culture sprang from religious scholarship and blossomed into temporal wealth and power, first in Italy, then Spain, England, France; from France to Germany, to Russia, Norway, Sweden.
Coincidentally, as each great nation came to power, drama blossomed to a peak; and with decline, it faded.
During all this rise and and fall, along with all the cultural, scientific, technological, and political advancements of the time, came devastating plagues and famines, floods, droughts, and continuous religious warfare that wiped out nearly half of the European population and drove peasants to towns and cities. All these happenings, good and bad, transformed the fabric of continental society from Medieval feudalism to Renaissance capitalism, paving the way for the modern world.
Scraps of evidence suggest the likelihood, despite the Council of Carthage, of vagabond troupes wandering from village to village throughout the centuries after the fall of Rome, playing rude comedies with stock Roman characters and passing the hat. The said, the vast majority of plays before the Renaissance were focused on religion and played to crowds all over Europe.
When religious themes were abruptly banned, a gaping hole appeared in the fabric of society, which anonymous poets and amateur players began to fill with similar plays having secular plots and themes. Protestants (and lapsed Catholics) enjoyed secular folk plays, pastorals and farces, only one by a named dramatist— Adam de la Halle—whose Jeu de Robin et Marion (1282) is considered the first non-religious play produced since Ancient times. At first very few in number compared to the ubiquitous mysteries and moralities, these plays were welcome relief from didactic Bible stories, and provided the grist for a still later Moment.
Moment #4: The Neoclassic Ideal
The long-lost Greek and Roman writings of Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Petrarch, Plutarch, Cato, and Cicero (to name a few) sparked minds grown weary of the Church, and free-thinking humanists aspired to transform Tuscany into a classical Greco-Roman city-state, its capitalist capitol Florence, under the Medici.
Ancient texts, of course, were all in Greek and Latin. Latin was the language of the Church, and was taught in Catholic schools. College texts typically included the plays of Plautus and Seneca, which students often acted out to amuse their peers, and which their masters translated, imitated, and (from the early 16th century) sometimes played at court.
The first known play in the new (age old) style since the Fall of Rome was Lodovico Ariosto’s comedy, The Casket, written in Italian and performed in 1508. Others quickly followed, including Machiavelli’s comedy The Mandrake (1519), all imitating the ancient Romans, according to the Ars Poetica of Horace, “to please and instruct”; but before they reached a golden peak, the Italian Wars broke out: France invaded and occupied the north, Spain the south, and Italy became a battleground, after which dramatic art in Italy became grand opera (1597).
While Florence remained the world center of art, music, and architecture, the best (or worst) that can be said for (or against) Italian Renaissance drama is that it provided the template for Spain and France to follow, with guidelines based on classical writings, that dominated theatre for the next 300 years.
The Golden Age of Spain
Columbus was Italian, but he claimed the New World for Spain, that kingdom having won all the wars to emerge as the Spanish Empire and, as Rome had Greece, assimilated Italy’s humanistic practices, including drama. Subsidized by Mayan gold, Spanish playwrights churned out thousands of religious and colloquial versions of Italian plays on love, chivalry, honor, and revenge, performed at court and for the common public.
Despite the abundance of these plays—four time as as many as the concurrent Elizabethans—the Spanish were constrained by the Church (and the Inquisition), their drama static, locked in time, and only a few (Cervantes, Calderon, Lope de Vega) have stood the test of time.
The Spanish Empire collapsed after the Armada, and with it Spanish drama, its place in history its influence on the new world power, England.
The Splendid Century of France
Meanwhile, In 1535, the Poetics, Aristotle’s thesis on the elements of tragedy, translated into Latin in 1498, was translated into Italian, then French, losing and adding bits and pieces along the way. What emerged were the Neoclassic Ideals.
Essentially, a Neoclassic play was a five-act composition restricted to a single plot, either tragic or comic, that took place in one location within a single day and night, in “pleasing” language, its characters credible and consistent, its action plausible (no ghosts), its message morally appropriate, et cetera, all aspects of verisimilitude and decorum.
These guidelines came too late for Italy; in Spain, the were applied to plays approved (and censored) by the Church. In France, however, the elite Academy interpreted these ideals as strict and steadfast rules that defined dramatic art, and deemed all plays that failed to follow them unfit for production.
Given these constrictions, it’s remarkable that drama managed to survive at all, incredible that it flourished. On the other hand, so far, great drama has appeared with the rise of every western power, and this was the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King, who patronized the works of his close friend, Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Moliere), one of the greatest playwrights of all time.
More to the point, this strict neoclassic form and style—based on misinterpretations of multiple translations of Aristotle—took root, spread to Germany and Russia, and remained the Continental standard for the next 200 years.
The English Renaissance
England emerged from the Spanish wars as the next center of world power, and (as ever) English drama followed suit, adopting Spanish elements and exploding into Shakespeare.
By the time the Renaissance reached England, religious drama had become a powerful weapon in the dispute between the Pope and Henry VIII, who broke from the Church in 1534 to establish the Church of England. Meanwhile, in 1499, the Italian Erasmus, “The Prince of Humanism,” had assumed a chair at Oxford University to teach Classics. the English Renaissance began, finding its dramatic voice, as usual, in the scholastic study of Greek and Latin (staple subjects in all western schools until Post-Modern times) and in the plays of the Spanish Golden Age.
Before Shakespeare
The earliest purely secular English play, Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucrece (1497), was a medieval interlude in the new Italian style, a genre that developed over fifty years into ridiculous comedies like Nicholas Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister (c. 1552) and the anonymous Gammer Gurton’s Needle (c. 1566), and Gorboduc (1551), the first very bloody English tragedy (and the first to use blank verse), by Thomases Norton and Sackville.
In the first year of her reign (1559), Queen Elizabeth was among the last of the European sovereigns to outlaw plays with religious themes, leaving the stage open to all other comers; but assaults against her legitimacy and the new Anglican church, as well as war with Spain, delayed her patronage until the Armada (1588). Meanwhile, a generous handful of students at Oxford and Cambridge, known collectively as the University Wits, wrote plays that mingled neoclassical and medieval elements to create the hybrid genre that came to be known as Shakespearean.
The first (though not a uni student and before Elizabeth was Queen) was Thomas Kid, whose play, The Spanish Tragedy (1587), took its form and theme of dark revenge from Spain, and influence the others; the best was Christopher Marlowe, who, had he not been killed in a barroom brawl at twenty-nine, might have eclipsed his friend and rival. His masterpiece, Doctor Faustus (1590) is a medieval morality play about a curious scholar who sells his soul to Satan for secular knowledge and burns in Hell, but in the style of Seneca.
Moment #5: The Bard of Avon
Few human beings have influenced western civilization more than the middle class glover’s son from Stratford, William Shakespeare. His lines are quoted as often as the scriptures and more than most other writers combined; his plays are performed more often, over a longer time, and today remain at the top of the Best Plays Ever list.
His impact on dramatic art is immeasurable, influencing his rivals, his followers, and every generation since, using those Neoclassic Ideals that suited his creative needs (five acts, poetic language, verisimilitude, consistency, decorum), ignoring those that didn’t (the Unities of action, time, and place), and taking the liberty to mix tragedy with comedy and poetry with prose, incorporate related subplots, develop complex characters, depict violent action, and feature ghosts and fairies. He also created a new dramatic genre—Historical Drama—with ten plays about the reigns of English monarchs that acquainted audiences with their nation’s past.
The impact on the world is less apparent but equally as profound. In his time, not only did his plays influence drama; they spoke to English power and glory (and to common people) of her history and legends, ancient times and places, with themes revealing truths about both his time and all times. He made the English proud to be English, and to this day he forms the basis of their culture.
Decline
The Virgin Queen died in 1603 and James I ruled for 22 years, then Charles I until his execution in 1642. Both their reigns were plagued by religious and political controversy, the Anglican Church at war with both Catholics and Protestants, and while dozens successful playwrights followed Shakespeare, polishing his literary model and devising new conventions, only one stands up to the Bard. The second best English playwright ever was Ben Jonson, whose caustic satire, Volpone, (1606), is a comic masterpiece of lust and greed still popular today.
The best of the rest—Jacobeans John Webster (The Duchess of Malfi, 1613) and John Fletcher (The Mad Lover, 1617) and Carolinians James Shirley (The Maid’s Revenge, 1626) and John Ford (‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 1631)—slipped with the times into cynical sensationalism, tragi-comedies with shocking plots and twisted themes in line with the corruption and debauchery of the English court.
Moment #6: Interregnum
So offensive were these plays (and so depraved the players) to the pious Puritans that when the Roundheads took control of Parliament, imprisoned (then beheaded) the first King Charles, and proclaimed the English Commonwealth, their leader, Oliver Cromwell, abolished drama and demolished all the theaters, branding plays on stage forever as “sinful, heathenish, lewd, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions.”
If any plays were written during the eighteen years between the kings, none survived. The English Renaissance was done.
Restoration
“Merry” King Charles II spent these years in exile, languishing luxuriously in France, where Moliere played for the Sun King, and when he reclaimed the English throne, he imported the Neoclassical Ideal. During his 25 year reign (1660-1685), while tragic plays were not in vogue (“a level of dullness and lubricity never surpassed before or since”), the opposite was true of their opposite.
Restoration Comedy, noted for its sexual explicitness, biting satire, stereotypical characters, and intellectual wit, delighted the King and his aristocratic court with brilliant plays by William Wycherley (The Country Wife, 1675), John Dryden (All for Love, 1677), and William Congreve (The Way of the World, 1700). By the end of the century, however, drama had become commercial, and producers, to broaden its appeal, mixed comedy and drama, softened is cynical tone, and focused on domestic issues of the rising middle class. These sentimental, inoffensive comedies and melodramas packed houses all over England, but their place in history is insignificant.
Enlightenment
The Renaissance began to blossom into the Age of Reason in 1635, when Rene Descartes proclaimed, “I think; therefore I am.” Or in 1687, with Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Or 1715, from the death of Louis XIV. In the history of drama, it’s the 18th Century.
Historically, it’s a bridge between the Renaissance and Modern times, during which rational thought encroached on religious faith and people longed for personal liberty, equal justice, and religious freedom. Philosophers and scientists spread ideas that changed the world forever.
In France, dramatic art was dominated by Voltaire (Zaïre, 1732), who clung ferociously to the Neoclassical ideal, but the rest of Europe was ready for something new.
Moment #7: Romanticism
The Renaissance came late to Germany, its territory consisting of as many as 350 secular and religious principalities and free cities in constant conflict, culminating in the Thirty Years War (1618-48). Germans had little time for drama.
What little they saw was mostly Shakespeare, played by second-rate English companies that toured German towns and cities from the 1580’s. The first indigenous playwrights didn’t appear until the middle of the 18th Century, by which time France had become the cultural center of the continent, and Neoclassicism took the stage—best represented by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Nathan the Wise, 1779).
Lessing also wrote the Hamburg Dramaturgy, a series of critical essays that refined Aristotle’s elements and redefined dramatic art. Essentially, he merged Shakespearean and neoclassic practices to form a hybrid that paved the way for the future.
Goethe and Schiller
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the American patriots fought for liberty, equality, and property, to inspire the early works of Johann Wolfgang Goethe (Goetz von Berlichingen, 1773) and Friedrich Schiller (The Robbers, 1782) in a short-lived movement known as Sturm un Drang (storm and stress). These controversial works were rarely played, and before they could start a German revolution, the Napoleonic Wars began. They were, however, widely read all over Europe—especially in France, where they influenced the minds of Lafayette, Jefferson, and Montesquieu, who wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, as well as Tom Paine, Ben Franklin, among more.
Romanticism, according Richard Wagner, whose musical compositions define the movement, was meant to “make man whole again” by throwing off the restrictions of civilized society and reconnecting with the natural world. On one hand, it harkened back to simpler (Medieval) times, with gothic architecture and Biblical paintings, chivalric poetry and prose; on the other, its sources in both Greek and indigenous legends and lore encouraged both the spread of democracy and the insular nationalism that infested German attitudes for the next 200 years.
The most significant contribution of this movement to dramatic art was its abolition of the Neoclassical Ideals, which triggered the upheaval in all the arts and sciences, focused on the individual and Mother Nature, known as the Romantic Era. It had a major impact on the visual arts, music, and prose fiction, lasting into the 20th Century; its drama started out with a bang but ended with the riots over Victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830. Foremost among the Germanic Romantics were the mature works of Schiller (William Tell, 1804) and Goethe (Faust, 1808)—the Father of Romantic Drama and the German Shakespeare, both among the finest ever.
The Paris Riots
German drama after Goethe turned to bombastic, spectacular epics glorifying Nordic gods and Arian heroes, but the ideas spread to Paris, where they faced fierce opposition from the neoclassic Academy. When riots broke out at the premiere performance of Hugo’s Hernani, the matter came to a head, and popular new form prevailed. The rickety old Ideals were done.
Romantic music, art, poetry, and narrative prose (philosophy, science, history, economics, politics, fiction) experienced significant moments during the Enlightenment, helping to set the stage for the Revolutions of 1848, the American Civil War, the Industrial Revolution, the Gilded Age. Drama, on the other hand, beginning with heroic, violent, spectacles that pitted the “noble savage” against the status quo, quickly deteriorated into bourgeois tragedies and sentimental comedies aimed the hoi polloi, who flocked to them in droves.
The 19th Century
Many factors caused the lack of significant drama in this sentimental style, among them population growth, the Industrial Revolution, religious revival, and over a thousand documented wars world-wide. People were poor and hungry, overworked and underpaid, and in sore need of mindless, spectacular entertainment.
Wars cost money, and state support for the arts declined; public theaters came under the control of capitalists, who capitalized on the growing wealth of the growing middle class. Playwrights, suddenly free at long last to give full throat to their wildest fantasies, were compelled to feed pap to the masses, “meller-drammers” and slapstick farce. Multitudes of such inferior offerings spread like wildfire across western Europe and North America, where actors chewed the scenery well into the following century.
Meanwhile, in northern Europe, new ideas began to form.
Summation
Renaissance humanism and the Enlightenment led to the belief that that responsibility for order in God’s world fell, at least in part, to man, and intelligent men and women set to putting it in order—discovering, describing, defining, measuring, and classifying, every mineral, vegetable, and animal, including humans, and through humans, drama. Hence the Neoclassical Ideal that played a role the rise and fall of Italy, Spain, England, and France and dominated the European stage for almost three hundred years.
Note that during all this time, plays were embraced by kings and wealthy patrons, the players well paid and celebrated (if not socially accepted). Playwrights tended to compliment the patrons and promote the status quo. Plays were rarely controversial; rather, they enriched their times with works that proclaimed and embodied national allegiance. The extent to which they influenced each rise to power (and reflected each decline) is subtle, but undeniable.
Romanticism broke the mold, proclaiming freedom, justice, and equality with plays unshackled by the past, cut off from Church and state, doomed from the start. The bottom line demanded mediocrity.
The Modern Age
Historians date the Modern Age from the 15th Century through the middle of the 18th (Early Modern) to the end of World War II (Late Modern). Drama, however, after Shakespeare and Moliere, remained locked in the Renaissance until the the closing years of the 19th Century.
From the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1871) until the beginning of World War I, the western world was stable, peaceful, prosperous, and free—La Belle Epoque in France; Pax Britannica in England; The Gilded Age in America. During these years, arts and science flourished, industry boomed, and technological inventions flooded the patent offices, all funded by growth capitalism. For the upper crust, life was a bowl of cherries.
The working classes, on the other hand, were exploited and abused, in poverty and squalor, as vividly described in the prose works of Dickens, Hugo, and the Russians (see below). They, along with Darwin, Marx, and Freud (and from them Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov), drew attention to these conditions in their works, promoting rational thought, scientific truth, and social justice, raising public consciousness, and prompting governments to adopt measures to improve them.
The best example of their collective efforts is the transformation of Tsarist Russia from Medieval feudalism to world power and the Golden Age of Russian literature in less than a century.
The Rise of Russia
In 1721, Peter the Great, having greatly extended Russia’s borders, declared the Russian Empire and set about bringing it into the modern world—according to French and Italian standards. By 1804, Alexander I had saved Europe from Napoleon; the Empire stretched from Finland to Alaska and rivaled England in world power; the Russian Court compared to Paris; and Russian Literature achieved its Golden Age.
The roots of literary realism appear in the novels of five iconic Russian writers, four of whom also wrote at least one landmark play. While their forms were Neoclassic or Romantic, their plots, characters, and themes were true to life.
- Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Gudunov (1825) is a tragedy about the legendary tsar in Shakespearean/Romantic style;
- Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector (1836) is a Neoclassic comedy about corruption and mistaken identity, a la Moliere;
- Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (1850) came too close to being real for church and state, who withheld its performance until 1872.
- Leo Tolstoy’s The Power of Darkness (1886) told of murder, incest infanticide, and redemption in a peasant village; withheld until 1902.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky is acclaimed by some to be the greatest writer of prose fiction ever, but he wrote no plays.
These luminaries paved the way for Chekhov, Stanislavski, and the revolution (see below), after which dramatic art, along with everything else in Soviet Union, was taken over by the Bolsheviks, dictated by the Politburo. The Golden Age was done.
Zola
The realistic prose of Russia spread across the continent to find a home in Paris, where Emile Zola absorbed its principles into his novels and critical works to become the Father of Literary Naturalism. This movement, influenced by the recent publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species, saw mankind not as moral and spiritual beings, but as animals whose thoughts and behavior were determined by genetics and environment in a universe where only the fittest survive. He wrote one only play (Thérèse Raquin, 1867), but his materialistic conception of reality eventually infected virtually every area of our culture, from politics and economics to literature and art.
Moment #8: Realism and Beyond
Before the 20th Century, dramatic art had always been, by definition, artifice. Language was exalted (poetry for the first 2000 years), characters exaggerated (masked), plots contrived, with song and dance, all guided by literary and dramatic conventions that could only exist on stage. The presentation of real life on stage had never occurred—theatre existed to distract an audience from real life, to take it to another time and place where everything made sense. By the middle of the 19th Century, the style was histrionic, written (and overplayed) more to please than to instruct.
The time was ripe for controversy, which exploded on the world with the works of three great founding fathers—Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov—who exposed injustice, intolerance, immorality, corruption, and hypocrisy, in plays that led to revolution in both drama and the western world.
Just like Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
Ibsen
Enlightenment came last (at long last) to the Scandinavian Peninsula, so it’s only (ironically) fitting that the Father of Modern Drama was Heinrich Ibsen, a Norwegian. Before him, the only theatre in Norway was imported from the west and played at feudal courts; after him, it virtually vanished, but his legacy is historically profound.
His first thirteen plays followed European standards, trending to Romantic, which he satirized in his first colossal masterpiece, Peer Gynt (1867), after which he jumped the track and changed the Modern world.
“The closing door heard round the world” took place in Copenhagen, 1879, when Nora Helmer walked out on her family in the closing scene of A Doll House. Not only did it launch a world-wide conversation on women’s rights; it revolutionized dramatic art.
A Doll House stripped away all artifice in an attempt to show life as it truly was—in this case a wife trapped in an unhappy marriage.
The effect on audiences was startling in two ways. The illusion of real life on stage struck an introspective chord, not unlike the appearance of Thespis in ancient Greece: “This could be me!” And the question of a woman’s place in a man’s world touched a nerve. The play was highly controversial and wildly popular, leading to productions elsewhere (albeit with censored endings) from Stockholm (1880) to Broadway (1889).
His next few plays were equally controversial and socially influential: Ghosts (1881), is a middle class tragedy brought on by syphilis; An Enemy of the People (1884) targets corrupt officials; The Wild Duck (1884) makes a tragi-comedy of necessary lies. Later, having discovered Freud, he veered from common themes (Social Realism) to focus on the motivations of his characters (Psychological Realism), with Symbolic overtones. Hedda Gabler (1890) has been called the female Hamlet; The Master Builder (1892) tackles mental illness. All outraged society, sold out houses, and redefined dramatic art world wide. They became the model for a host of followers and became the dominant form of drama throughout Modern time—indeed, it still persists today.
Strindberg
Meanwhile in Sweden, influenced by Ibsen, the writings of Darwin, Freud, and Emile Zola (the Father of Literary Naturalism), Auguste Strindberg probed the darker side of reality, delving into the self-serving, materialistic motivations of his characters to reveal the causes of the issues brought to light by Realism and become the Father of Dramatic Naturalism.
Like Ibsen, Strindberg was the first of his people to write plays, eleven in outmoded modes (Master Olaf, 1872) before The Father (1886), in which a woman drives her husband mad. Equally outrageous and popular, it prompted is masterpiece, Miss Julie (1888) and other naturalistic plays before, also like Ibsen, he explored more symbolic forms.
Chekhov
Meanwhile in Russia, Anton Chekhov, a physician by trade and author of hundreds of short stories, wrote four great realistic plays that make him the Father of Russian Realism. All set on country estates, their characters the landed gentry, they foreshadowed, but could not stop the coming revolution. The Seagull (1896) is a play about a play about the end of everything that ends in suicide; Uncle Vanya (1899) and The Three Sisters, 1901) epitomize the apathetic ennui of the ruling class; and most symbolically, The Cherry Orchard (1904), sacrifices acres of ancient trees to make way for the future. All four depict a crumbling Russian society.
Moment 9: Stanislavski
While Drama is the written word, the proof is in the Spectacle—the play presented to an audience. A realistic play had the curtain rise on a lifelike setting, realistic to the last detail, with pictures on the walls, shelves with books and nick-knacks, costumes one might wear to work, all crafted to reinforce the illusion of reality. But the most important—and enduring—element of dramatic art on stage is realistic acting.
While spectacle (including acting) lies beyond the scope of literary drama—Stanislavsky never wrote a play—his contribution to both theatre and the course of history is worth noting. Briefly, the rich, young, amateur actor rejected the overplayed acting style developed over the centuries and created a system that challenged the actor to abandon ego and allow body, mind, and spirit to integrate with those of a character in a given situation. Then, to demonstrate his theories, he founded the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) in 1898.
Two years earlier, in Petersburg, the first performance of The Seagull, despite performances by the best actors in Russia, was a total disaster, hissed and booed by the audience, causing Chekhov to vow never to write another play. When Stanislavsky chose it for the opening season at the MAT, the play became an international sensation, thanks to realistic acting.
The system spread around the globe, most notably, in 1923, when Stanislavsky brought the MAT to New York and blew the 22-year-old mind of Lee Strasberg, a poor Polish immigrant and amateur actor, who absorbed, transposed, and interpreted Stanislavsky’s principles into “method acting” and, in 1947, founded the Actor’s Studio. Among his early disciples was Marlon Brando, whose ultra-realistic performance that very first year as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire set off decades of controversy over the art and craft of acting that ultimately boiled down to two categories: Method vs Technique. Each had its own various schools of thought, but both aimed to present an illusion of real life.
Strasberg personally coached hundreds of young actors, nearly fifty of whom became household names (Famous Actors Studio Alumni), while in 1951, Brando brought Streetcar and the Method to American movie-goers, followed by dozens of other luminaries.
Do you see where this is going?
Cinematic Realism
The break with the past was subtle, but profound. Before the Method, movies were cowboys, romance, crime, song and dance and actors overplayed their roles, more stereotypical personalities than people. All at once the general public was exposed to Dramatic Realism—in two dimensions on a screen, to be sure, but realistically portrayed to the least and last detail.
Movies all at once were truly Shakespeare’s “mirror” held to life, revealing people like themselves in trying times, and they (being human) imitated what they saw and heard. Young American men who looked, dressed, spoke, and behaved like (Strasberg-trained) James Dean went out with girls who looked and acted like (ditto) Marilyn Monroe. Overnight, ironically, the mirror images turned into models for the roles real people played in life. They copied the image; the image copied them to become the model for the culture of the ’50’s—and ever since, even more so on TV and the internet.
All thanks to Stanislavsky.
But is film dramatic art? Yes, in a two-dimensional way. But movies began as and remain much more a visual art than dramatic, first in black and white to organ music, then sound tracks with spoken words, then color, offering technical advantages of close-up, pan and zoom, and gripping images of actual phenomena, from waterfalls to bomb blasts, in Living Color. For the most part, dialogue was sparse and unremarkable. The drama was in the visual action, not the language.
Anti-Realism
No sooner had Realism eclipsed all the old dramatic forms than a plethora of anti-realistic alternatives cropped up to challenge stark reality. Beginning in Germany (Expressionism) and Russia (Symbolism), these movements ranged from French Surrealism and Italian Futurism through Poetic Mysticism, Cryptic Iconoclasm, through the end of World War II to Existentialism and Theatre of the Absurd.
All were splashes in the pan, each with its singular Moment in Time, its Bohemian to Beatnik culture that rejected or distorted reality in reaction to conditions of their time. All flared up in controversy over style and substance, and had their day in the sun—many won mainstream awards—but the plays were notoriously bewildering to the ordinary person. Once the novelty wore off, the movements fizzled—shooting stars that fizzled on the outer fringe of the mainstream.
The considerable effect of anti-realistic plays on mainstream drama is described elsewhere. Essentially, most Modern playwrights used those anti-realistic concepts and devices that drew attention, made a point, and worked in the world of their plays. Many started out on the fringe and worked their way up and in. The best of many good examples is Edward Albee, who reshaped two early, short, absurdist comedies, The Sandbox and The American Dream, into the absurdly naturalistic travesty, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The American Century
Before the War for Independence, there was virtually no theatre in what is now the United States. The colonists were Puritans, and pleasure was a sin. What little existed for the following fifty years came from England, with English actors playing the classics and popular English plays—they lost the war, but left a legacy. By the time Americans started writing and performing plays, the current English repertoire was mediocre wit and melodrama, but it spread like wildfire across the continent. By the end of the century every major town and city from Boston to Sacramento had at least one “opera house” (more than a few on Broadway), with professional companies in residence or riding the rails on tour, playing on riverboats.
Bear in mind that theatre back then was intended far more to please than to instruct. Americans were the hardworking poor, in need of a little relief, and the fat cat capitalists, who sold them what they wanted: laughs and tears and spectacle. One early example, tragically, was Our American Cousin, the English comedy that played the Ford Theatre on the night an American actor assassinated Abraham Lincoln.
Moment #10: O’Neill
In 1912, a group of American amateurs formed the Toy Theatre in Boston to produce Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov—and George Bernard Shaw, whose semi-realistic comedies inspired the winner of the first Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Why Marry? (1919). Within five years there fifty “Little Theatres” in cities nationwide.
By far most famous of these groups was the Provincetown Players, on the coast of Massachusetts, for spawning one of the greatest playwrights of all time.
The Father of American Drama (and one of the greatest playwrights of all time) was the son of James O’Neill, a famous actor who could have been great had he not spent his career playing the lead in The Count of Monte Cristo. The story of his early life is revealed in Long Day’s Journey into Night—tubercular son of a tyrannical, tight-fisted, alcoholic father and guilt-ridden, morphine-addicted mother, his brother a cynical playboy lush. To in 1907, after a year at Princeton, escaped aboard a merchant ship bound for Honduras, where he searched in vain for gold. Back in the States (but not at home), he worked odd jobs, then sailed again, to Brazil, to work briefly for US corporations, after which he signed on full time as an able-bodied seaman with the American Line of transatlantic liners, where came to know the sailors who became characters in his early plays.
Hard work, harsh weather, and heavy drinking for five years took a toll on his consumptive constitution and, in 1912, landed him two months in a sanatorium. His stay there—and his quasi-romantic relationship with a fellow patient who inspired and encouraged him—unleashed a torrent of naturalistic one-act plays of the sea and twisted souls that triggered his fateful decision to become a professional playwright.
In 1916, he joined the players in Provincetown, where his early efforts played successfully. Two years later, his first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, was produced on Broadway. A realistic domestic drama about two brothers with separate hopes and dreams, it won the second Pulitzer award. His second attempt was The Straw, unproduced but later published, a clumsy eulogy for the girl who had urged him on, now on her deathbed, and the one that followed was an abysmal melodramatic adventure flop called Gold, but the fourth was Anna Christie (1920), his first masterpiece, about a seaman and whore with a golden heart, which won the fourth (his second) Pulitzer.
All at once, American drama came to life in a surge of first-rate followers who established realism as the standard genre for the remainder of the century. But O’Neill was just beginning.
His next play, that same year (1920), The Emperor Jones, his first box office success, injected realism with expressionism and a touch of the psychologically surreal—as did The Hairy Ape, two years (and two realistic plays) later (1922). Later plays explored a broad range of eclectic forms and styles, from the ancient Greeks to symbolism, including (only) one light-hearted comedy—all but a few true works of genius. These too were emulated, and movements sprang up on the fringe. By the middle of the century, he and his emulators had made New York the capital of the theatrical world, mainstream on Broadway, avant-garde Off-(Left).
More to the point, these plays coincided with the advent of talking pictures, and Broadway hits were filmed and distributed world wide. The headline on the Anna Christie poster was the legendary “Garbo Talks!” and all her millions of fans flocked to hear. Many first-rate playwrights followed actors out to Hollywood, for the bucks. Not so, O’Neill; he never wrote a screenplay.
Emulators
Among the contemporary dramatists who followed O’Neill down one path or another were Paul Green, Maxwell Anderson, Susan Glaspell, Elmer Rice, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, William Inge, William Saroyan, Thornton Wilder, Robert Sherwood, and Kaufmann and Hart (to name a few), and best works rose to greatness as American classics—albeit none equal to O’Neill.
The impact of this repertoire would most certainly have sparked a revolution in the ‘Thirties, had live theatre survived the talkies and the government. Movies aren’t the same as being there. Nonetheless, they captured the dramatic essence of the playwrights’ works in meticulous, close-up detail—with life-like performances by method actors—that realistically changed the way people saw and thought about themselves and the world.
Williams and Miller
Modern American drama reached its peak in the decade after World War II, with the early and mature works of two iconic playwrights, both heavily indebted to O’Neill in different ways.
Tennessee Williams explored the id of human nature; Arthur Miller analyzed the ego. Both found success with their first Broadway plays (The Glass Menagerie, 1944; All My Sons, 1947) and won Pulitzer Prizes for their next (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1948, and Death of a Salesman, 1949). All four are modern classics, as are numerous others in their long and productive careers, most of which were filmed and distributed world wide.
In their footsteps followed countless others, most notably Edward Albee and Neil Simon, as the Modern Age merged into our present Post-Modern time. Broadway played mainstream realism, sophisticated comedy, and musicals. On the fringe innovative dramatists experimented with the new European forms and methods that had exploded on the world at the end of the Age.
Off Broadway
Traditionally, Broadway theaters were those that lay between 6th and 8th Avenues, from 40th Street to 54th, centered in Times Square. Those outside that geographic area were “Off.” In 1960, the League of Broadway Theaters officially divided all Manhattan houses according to seating capacity: 500 or more was Broadway; fewer was Off. The former was commercial entertainment, played for profit, more to please than to instruct. Off Broadway was for creative innovation.
The first Off Broadway theatre was Cherry Lane, presenting esoteric drama for forty years before Off Broadway had a name. The original (temporary) home of the Living Theatre (1951-53), it saw the American premiere of Becket’s Endgame (1958), the early works of Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and literally hundreds of others, and produced the smash hit Godpell (1971), which moved to Broadway and ran five years.
Cherry Lane was only one of many Off Broadway houses, in which a growing number of companies staged plays considered, for one reason or another, unfit for Broadway—although many of the best productions moved uptown and made history. Most notably, Joe Papp’s Public Theatre complex, with six auditoria, where hundreds of famous people got their starts, and which remains successfully in operation.
Other notable venues include the Theatre de Lys, where Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, ran for six years (1955-61) to set a record, broken only by The Fantasticks! at the Sullivan Street Playhouse—which set the all-time record at forty-two! (1960-2002). Jose Quintero’s production of O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh at the Circle in the Square (1956) led to his directing Long Day’s Journey into Night on Broadway, and St Mark’s Playhouse introduced Genet to America with The Blacks (1961).
Joe Papp
Born in the slums of Brooklyn, son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Josef Yossil Papirofsky (aka Joe Papp) grew up loving Shakespeare, and in 1954 he organized a workshop that two years later, on a $250 budget, produced Julius Caesar in lower Manhattan’s East River Park—free of charge. Hundreds attended, so they continued with others until 1959, when the City of New York granted them the use of Central Park, and two years later build the Delacorte amphitheater to house the annual Shakespeare in the Park festival, where every summer since at least two plays are played for thousands, still free of charge.
Ten years later, conscious of changing times, he leased the dilapidated Astor Place Library and converted it into the Public Theater—a huge six-venue complex devoted exclusively to new experimental plays. It opened with a bang in 1967 with a blockbuster, and soon became a home to dozens of talented young dramatists, many of whom won awards, some matured into legends, as he became the most consistently successful producer in New York. His production of A Chorus Line, restaged for Broadway, ran for fifteen years (1975-90), the longest on Broadway until Cats, (1982-2000).
The Living Theatre
In 1947, actor/director Judith Malina and her partner, poet/painter Julian Beck, and their Beatnik/actor friends started staging plays in their living room to launch what would become become the most radical, controversial, and longest-lasting company of players in theatre history.
In 1951 The Living Theatre rented Cherry Lane and presented two seasons of off-beat plays by European anti-Realists (Brecht, Cocteau, Pirandello, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and—who’d have thought?—Picasso) throughout the ‘Fifties. Their first original play was The Connection (1959), by Jack Gelber, about eight junkies waiting for their dealer against a background of soulful jazz. It won Obies for Best New Play, Best Actor (Warren Finnerty), and Best All-Around Production (Malina and Beck), and sent a shock wave through contemporary theatre.
Along the way, the company had become a communal family of Beatnik actors, writers, artists, and musicians with a definite socio-political purpose, demonstrated in their 1963 collaboration on The Brig, by Kenneth H. Brown, about the brutal treatment of U. S. Marines in prison, which also won three Obies, for direction (Malina), Design (Beck), and Best Production.
While not specifically focused on the conflict looming in Southeast Asia (the author, a former marine, had served 30 days for going AWOL in Japan), The Brig was the first play to denounce America’s military justice system, and it so disturbed the establishment that the IRS falsely charged the Becks with tax evasion. When Julian appeared in court dressed as Portia in The Merchant of Venice, he was jailed for contempt of court. Upon his release, he and Malina took the troupe abroad, where their radical productions stretched the boundaries of human art theatre and astonished audiences all over Europe.
Three years later they returned to tour the States with four theatrical bombshells that included frontal nudity and incitements, and often ended with arrests. Since then they’ve toured as nomads, never settling in one place, creating dozens of works that cry out for humanity. The mother of them all, The Living Theatre was the first and remains the oldest experimental theatre in America.
Musical Theatre
In the middle of World War II, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, the Fathers of the Modern musical, produced Oklahoma! on Broadway, where it ran for an unprecedented 2,212 performances and opened the floodgates for a gigantic new genre of theatrical entertainment that swept dramatic realism into a corner, where it struggled to survive.
While music had been part of theatre since the Greeks, its function was traditionally set apart from the plot, as punctuating interludes. Cole Porter and the Gershwins wrote songs for fluffy comedies that were built around them. Jerome Kern wrote the music to fit the lyrics of Oscar Hammerstein’s 1927 adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel, Show Boat, integrating songs with melodrama to both critical and popular acclaim, but the Crash of ’29 put the genre on the shelf for a dozen years.
Then Hammerstein met Richard Rodgers, and the Golden Age of Musical Comedy began, the best of all worlds—story, song and dance (just like the Greeks), with spectacle galore—at the expense of dramatic realism and its purely verbal offshoots. Which poses the question: Is musical theatre dramatic art?
Just as the aesthetic impulse of film is visual, music is an aural art. Like the dithyrambic Greeks, when drama first sprang from song and dance, the modern American musical crawled up from minstrel shows, Tin Pan Alley, and the Ziegfeld Follies, its function to bridge the gap between musical numbers—disc jockeys, as it were. Oklahoma! was a big step up, but scripts were sentimental melodramas, secondary to the music (and related spectacle). While in the coming decades musicals would tackle serious plots and themes, and many libretti have literary value, the hooks that put fannies in the seats were and remain uplifting song and dance and spectacle—and that’s what it was all about.
Oblivion
Until the 19th Century, theatre was traditionally produced by noble patrons, first at court, then for the public. The Industrial Revolution (and Charles Darwin) brought on a drastic shift in the world economy, and the human art was forced to make its own way in a capitalist, dog-eat-dog society. Since then, mainstream drama has relied on plays that pleased the low-brow public, first with melodramas and low comedies, then the same with music. Their popularity kept literary drama, from Ibsen to Albee, on the fringe of a rapidly vanishing theatre audience.
By the mid-fifties, every American household owned a television set, and theatre attendance had fallen 80 percent. While great plays continued to be written and produced, few people ever saw them, and (again) the revolution was put off.
But not for long.
Summation
Ever since the Renaissance, the western world had sought to balance faith and science in the quest for human progress. Humanists believed if people worked for humankind, God would reward them; enlightened humanists fought for freedom. The Industrial Revolution brought about the Gilded Age, which prompted the disenfranchised masses to question that quest in the face of reality, especially after two world wars.
Hoards of worried Americans, in denial, flocked to churches, synagogues, and mosques and a growing number of secular distractions—movies, ball games, hobbies, causes, friends and relatives—to escape. Those few who still went to the theatre saw mostly popular mainstream plays and musicals, mindless and spectacular. Conditions reminiscent of the decline and fall of Ancient Rome.
Early Modern writers exposed truth behind the myth of a moral universe, first in popular novels, then on stage, presenting great plays that showed life as it was. These works led to the social and political reforms that reached their peak in the decades following World War II in America, which emerged as the unrivaled leader of the western world in power, wealth, and unlimited opportunity, among other things, including drama. Broadway, for all its fluffy mainstream musicals, produced a goodly quantity of straight plays, many works of genius, made into movies for the world to see.
Given the ubiquity and hypnotic power of audio-visual media and the human instinct to mimic what we hear and see, one comes to the startling conclusion that ever since Ibsen, dramatic art—on stage or otherwise, in all its many forms—has played a major role in shaping western culture. Monkey see, monkey do, and people see a lot of movies.
Furthermore, along with the radical change in style, came arguments for humankind not heard on stage since Aristophanes, who likewise wrote sardonic plays about decay. Modern Realism showed the Common Man in conflict with the common world and redefined the human art, with themes derived from the moral and ethical principles of the ancient Golden Age, to impact the major social and political reforms of the 20th Century.
But Aristophanes came at the end of his Age. Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, and Stanislavsky were the Fathers of the form adopted by the multitudes of playwrights and producers who, like the Greeks, used drama both to entertain and educate the populace. While movies were not live theatre and the masses don’t see plays, cinematic realism both reflected and defined the Modern Age. It reached its peak in the 1950’s with the realistic plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and plateaued through Edward Albee and Neil Simon to remain the dominant (non-musical) form today.
Cold Reads/International 