Paragraphs on Greeks, Romans,

• Dithyrambs were epic poems sung and danced by dozens of well-rehearsed performers for thousands of spectators at the City Dionysia, a religious festival in honor of the god of fertility, wine and revelry. The spectacular effect of the spoken ode became a powerful political tool, evolved into the Golden Age, and degenerated during the Peloponnesian Wars.
• The conquering Romans copied the Greeks until the fascist Roman Catholic Church abolished theatre altogether—for a thousand years!

The last Roman plays written that exist today are eight tragedies by Seneca, who died in 65 CE. We know no other plays or playwrights until the German nun, Hrotsvitha (935-1001), wrote six religious comedies imitating Terence (died 159 BCE)

• Church drama late 10th century through early middle ages
• Renaissance scholars exhumed what classics remained and adopted them as the Neoclassic Ideal, the Greco-Roman forms and functions of which, embellished over time, led to Shakespeare and Moliere, and maintained its influence on European culture until the middle of the 19th Century.
• Meanwhile, in the 18th Century, German Sturm und Drang rose to oppose the neoclassicists, inspired by the democratic American (and inspiring the French) Revolutions, followed by the Romantic movement, with its appeal to emotions rather than intellect. It came to a head in 1830, when Victor Hugo’s Hernani caused a riot at the Comedie Francaise. Idealism lost the war, but democracy brought with it ownership and property,  and the masses suffered miserably. Romanticism soon devolved into soppy commercial melodrama for the well-to-do, and while they followed the forms developed through the ages, the world drifted away from their moral values.
• “The Closing Door Heard Round the World” was Nora walking out on Torvald in Ibsen’s play, A Doll House (1879), which did away with the fourth wall and introduced dramatic and theatrical Realism, focused on the common man in conflict with himself and the world. He and others used their plays to bring attention the flaws they saw in the way things were—according to the ancient values. Their tremendous popularity (and notoriety) in Europe and America was a significant factor in the social reforms of the early 20th Century.
• No sooner had Realism eclipsed all other forms than a gaggle of Anti-Realistic forms sprang up—Naturalism, Symbolism, Expressionism. Futurism, Existentialism, Theatre of the Absurd (to name a few). One thing all had in common was progressive, creative concern for humankind.
• The American Century began in 1920 with Eugene O’Neill’s Beyond the Horizon and blossomed  late in  the ’40’s with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. Scores of superb playwrights followed, flooding the stage with masterworks of realistic and experimental drama that dominated theatre at home and abroad until middle of the last century, when it splintered into the kaleidoscope of multicultural confusion that exists today.
• While American (and European) drama continued to define the West, its influence was eroded by the emergence of, cheaper, more accessible pastimes. Radio and motion pictures drew the masses; later TV; now the internet. More insidiously, spectator sports and rock concerts drew huge crowds, reminding one of Roman gladiators. Those few who attended plays preferred spectacular musicals, with occasional light comedies, lurid dramas; only now and then a literary masterpiece. The effect of these distractions is the chaos of our post-modern world, the impending Fall of America, the abandonment of classical reason, and the end of western civilization.