Under Construction
Continue reading Open Theatre Material (discard as needed)“Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.”
Category Archives: c Cultural Heritage
Post-Modern Times
Under Construction
This page, when completed, will try to make sense of all that’s happened since the end of World War II.
Continue reading Post-Modern TimesThe Dark and Middle Ages
Under Construction
This page, when completed, will narrate the centuries of church abolishment and resurrection between the classics and their rediscovery.
Continue reading The Dark and Middle AgesBeginning to End (Brief Notes)
Paragraphs on Greeks, Romans,
Continue reading Beginning to End (Brief Notes)The American Century
NOTE: The remainder of this narrative deals primarily with theatre in the United States, although significant happenings in other nations are addressed as they pertain to the human art.
Immediately after the American Revolution, theatre in the new United States began to thrive; within ten years four companies were touring the eastern seaboard. After the War of 1812, the exploding population migrated west, and by the end of the 19th 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. Continue reading The American Century
Post-modern plays
No Holds Barred
America peaked in the 1950’s, burst in the ’60’s, and fizzled out and almost vanished in
I’m beginning to think I’m scribbling gibberish, like Robert in Proof.
Or what was Jack writing in The Shining? “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Continue reading Post-modern plays
The Modern Age
Modern Times
Too many factors are involved in the transformation that occurred in the western world over the next 200 years to cover in the context of this essay. From the enlightened writings of rational philosophers (and a crumbling aristocracy) came wars, not for land or religious faith, but for bread and freedom; then Napoleon, more revolutions, the rise of the British (and fall of the Spanish, French, Dutch, and Holy Roman) Empires, the Industrial Revolution, Freud, Darwin, and Marx, and the Great Depression, sandwiched between two world wars, at which point the Modern Era ends and Postmodern life on earth begins, with America (vs the Bad Guys) in control.
Continue reading The Modern AgeMedieval Drama
Under Construction
This post, when written, will describe and link to church plays.
Renaissance Drama
UNDER CONSTRUCTION
From Erasmus to Victor Hugo
Shakespeare’s plays evolved from (1) Italian translations and imitations of Roman plays that copied the Greeks and (2) 500 years of indigenous religious plays, secular moralities, and lewd farces. From the first he retained the useful conventions of the Neoclassical Ideal and Aristotle’s elements—the 5-act structure, dialogue in verse (frequently rhymed couplets), kings and heroes—and ignored those that retrained his imagination. His plays intentionally violated the unities of time, place, and action, mixed tragedy and comedy, with parallel plots and gruesome onstage murders. Indigenous medieval drama broadened his scope to include the wit and wisdom of the common man, who spoke contemporary prose (in words now archaic or extinct). What emerged is universally accepted as the best that ever was, and its challenges well worth the rewards.
Shakespeare’s plays, in turn, were imitated and adapted through the centuries that followed, whittled down from several hours to less the two; five acts to four, then three; now mostly two. His poetry turned to purple prose in the 18th Century and was condensed in the 20th, his lengthy, lofty language lost through generations to the Twitter limit of today. Nonetheless, his lines (and those of the contemporary King James Version of the Bible) are quoted more than most of the others put together); his characters are models for our playwrights, and his plots and themes are universal.
Renaissance
The evolution of dramatic literary art over the next five hundred years creatively reflects and helps define the phenomenal transition of western culture from the Great Schism in in the Catholic Church through the Holy Wars, Italian Humanism, and the Protestant Reformation, into the Renaissance, which led to the Enlightenment, the Modern Age, and since.
Continue reading Renaissance
Cold Reads/International 