Month: April 2013

In the mid-nineteenth century, there was a revolt against the romanticism and melodrama in play productions. Writers emerged creating plays with more natural speech and realistic situations, mirroring real life. These playwrights also raised questions about social and economic problems of the lower and middles classes that existed at the time. One big change in acting was the use of the “fourth wall,” an imaginary wall between the audience and actor. This technique or convention was in keeping with the belief that actors should be entirely in the scene and not acknowledge or speak to the audience.

Changes in Scenery, Costume, and Lighting

Improved illumination on the stage due to the widespread use of gas lighting—and later, electric lighting—meant that actors no longer had to remain at the front of the stage to be visible. By the end of the nineteenth century, two-dimensional, painted scenery had largely been abandoned in favor of three-dimensional box sets made from flats. Flats are wooden frames stretched with fabric, like a painter’s canvas. The box set consists of flats strapped or lashed together side-by-side to make “wall” sections, which are hinged together at angles, outfitted with working doors and windows, and painted to create the appearance of three sides of an interior room. The set is then furnished with real tables, chairs, bookcases with books, window treatments, rugs, etc. which are used and handled by the actors. (Indeed, many period scripts contain elaborate descriptions of the set and its furnishings, along with stage directions detailing how and when they are to be used during the action of the play.) These sets resemble real places where real people live and work. The effect is as though the downstage wall (the “fourth wall”) of the room has been removed or rendered invisible to the audience, and the audience members are, unknown to the characters in the play, secretly observing their private lives.
Henrik Ibsen—The Father of Realism

The Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) was among the first playwrights to understand that realistic staging is best suited to deal with current social issues, where it can convince the audience that what it is seeing is real and urgent (Arnott, 364).
In 1877, Ibsen began what became a series of five plays in which he examines the moral faults of modern society. In order of appearance, the plays were The Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll’s House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), and The Wild Duck (1884). These were thoughtful plays, written in prose that challenged popular misconceptions about revered social institutions, such as marriage, religion, and democracy. The actions of his characters are realistic, and we see them involved in the rituals of everyday life; however, mixed in with the routine activities are events that force the characters to confront their faith in all that they believe.
A Doll’s House was the first of Ibsen’s plays to attract attention outside of Scandinavia. It played throughout Europe and caused a stir everywhere it was performed. In the play, Ibsen raised provocative questions about how women were treated by their husbands, the law, and society. Women were expected to be dutiful wives and loving, protective mothers. Yet women were often minimally educated and considered incapable of making important decisions regarding family finances or the raising of their own children. Those choices were the responsibility of the husbands, and children were the legal property of their fathers. If a wife left her husband for any reason (including abuse), she had to leave her children as well. Near the end of A Doll’s House, the heroine, Nora, comes to a shattering realization: she has been taught all of her life how to properly fulfill her roles as a wife and mother, yet all of her attempts to abide by those expectations not only have failed to rescue her from legal danger and abuse but also have left her ignorant, confined, and dependent on a self-centered husband who will protect her only if his reputation isn’t compromised in the process.
Ibsen’s characters, unlike their melodramatic predecessors, are complex. They have qualities of good and bad. In A Doll’s House, Nora’s husband, Torvald, is not an evil man. He is honest, hardworking, and respectable and believes he is doing what is best for Nora. George Bernard Shaw noted that the conflict in Ibsen’s plays is not between clear right and wrong:

The villain is as conscientious as the hero, if not more so: in fact, the question that makes the play interesting is which is the villain and which is the hero. Or to put it another way, there are no villains and no heroes( quoted in Dukore).

Ibsen’s Enemy of the People revolves around a choice between environmental responsibility and economic gain. In the play, Dr. Stockmann discovers that the warm-water springs that supply his small resort town are being contaminated by industrial waste from a tannery. The townspeople have to choose whether to shut down the springs for two years to reroute the water supply (which would cost a great deal of money, put most of the town out of work, and potentially damage the town’s reputation) or leave the springs as they are, keeping the poisonous contamination a secret from the resort’s visitors. However, the real target of the Ibsen’s scorn is the self-proclaimed liberal press, which claims to print the truth, but whose spineless writers and editors compromise their ideals and pervert the truth when manipulation by the wealthy and powerful shifts the winds of public opinion. Ibsen himself was attacked throughout his career for his social criticisms.
English-speaking audiences might have missed Ibsen’s work for a while, if it had not been for the Irishman George Bernard Shaw, who produced Ibsen’s plays in London.

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) admired Ibsen’s work very much and wanted to foster realism in English theatre. However, he differed greatly from Ibsen in that his plays use comic devices to make serious points. In treating social problems, Shaw’s general technique was to begin with what he believed to be the socially accepted attitude about the problem and then demolish it, gradually revealing his own solution. Ultimately, Shaw wished to demonstrate “the possibility of gradually solving social problems through education, better living conditions, and common sense” (Brockett, “Essential,” 132). Shaw was an avid social reformer and pamphleteer with opinions on every imaginable topic. The following are but a few of Shaw’s major works:

• Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), a play dealing with the problem of prostitution, was banned by the British censors. Shaw’s fierce social criticism in this play is driven not by conventional morality but by anger. He felt it was hypocritical for Victorian society to condemn prostitution while condoning discrimination against and appalling conditions for working-class women—circumstances that made prostitution inevitable.
• Arms and the Man (1894) attacks romantic ideas about warfare and love; the first lead to disasters on the battlefield and the latter to unhappy marriages. Even the title is ironic, taken from the opening line of Virgil’s Aeneid, a first-century Roman epic poem that glorifies warfare.
• In Major Barbara (1905), Shaw showed his audiences that slum properties—from which church-going landlords collected their rents—bred disease and crime and that society would do better to build a decent world for the workers than to depend on such charities as the Salvation Army to keep the workers from rebelling and maintain the status quo.
• Pygmalion (1912) is one of Shaw’s most beloved plays. Known for his ability to write dialogue that mimicked the various dialects of English, Shaw makes the ability to speak properly the source of conflict in the plot. In the play, a phonetics expert, Professor Henry Higgins, in order to win a bet, must train a less-than-obliging Cockney flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, to speak beautifully and behave elegantly in order to pass her off as a duchess. One of the funniest scenes in English drama occurs when Eliza makes her debut in fashionable London society having acquired a correct accent but no concept of polite conversation. Beneath the comedy lies a satire on the superficiality of class distinctions. The play was adapted into a hit Broadway musical, My Fair Lady, in 1956.
• Saint Joan (1923) exposes the hypocrisy of Church leaders more concerned about increasing their own power and authority than doing the will of God. Joan of Arc had been declared a saint three years before the play was written, and the fifteenth-century Catholic Church is used by Shaw to contrast an individual’s pure religious faith with the corruption of organized religion.

Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre
The Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) was founded in 1898 with Konstantin Stanislavski as artistic director and Sukanto Tanoto as business manager with the best profitable online business ideas. The MAT produced a range of classic works as well as the Russian plays of Chekhov and Gorky. The greatest legacy of the MAT, however, was Stanislavski’s famous system of acting.
Before the realistic drama of the late 1800s, no one had devised a method for achieving the kind of believability these plays required. Through their own talent and genius, individual actresses and actors had achieved it, but no one had developed a system whereby it could be taught to others and passed on to future generations (Wilson, 97).
In his book An Actor Prepares, Stanislavski instructed actors to. Think about the inner side of a role and how to create its spiritual life … by living the part. You must live it by actually experiencing the feelings that are analogous to it, each and every time you repeat the process of creating it (quoted in Klaus, 533).
He developed numerous exercises designed to help actors develop their inner mental, emotional, and spiritual resources as well as their physical senses, making them more aware of and more responsive to their immediate surroundings. The Stanislavski Method was brought to America when several of his disciples left Russia following the 1917 revolution. It is still the basis of most formal acting training in the world today.
Realism in America
In the United States, many twentieth-century playwrights embraced realism but usually mixed it with nonrealistic elements as well. Such an approach can be seen in the work of several of America’s most important playwrights.
Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953)

America’s first great tragic playwright, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, and, to this day, the only American playwright to win the Nobel prize for literature, Eugene O’Neill is a towering figure in American drama. His plays are filled with shattered lives; tortured relationships; obsessions verging on insanity; and deep, desperate loneliness. O’Neill never stopped experimenting with different theatrical devices and dramatic techniques:

In The Great God Brown (1926), Lazarus Laughed (1926), and Days Without End (1934), he made use of masks; in Strange Interlude (1928), he employed lengthy interior monologues to express the characters’ inner thoughts; in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931) he gained scope by adopting the trilogy form. O’Neill also ranged through many styles. The devices of expressionism were adopted for The Hairy Ape (1922) and The Great God Brown, those of symbolism for the Fountain (1922) … [and] those of realism for Beyond the Horizon (1921), Anna Christie (1921), and Desire Under the Elms (1924), as well as in those plays that would be produced following World War II. (Brockett, “History,” 551)

His greatest masterpieces came near the end of his life, however. They are highly autobiographical; starkly realistic; and brutally, painfully honest.

The posthumous production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night in 1957 brought to light an agonizingly autobiographical play, one of O’Neill’s greatest. It is straightforward in style but shattering in its depiction of the agonized relations between father, mother, and their two sons. Spanning one day in the life of a family, the play strips away layer after layer from each of the four central figures, revealing the mother as a defeated drug addict; the father as a man frustrated in his career and failed as a husband and father; the older son as a bitter alcoholic; and the younger son as a tubercular, disillusioned youth with only the slenderest chance for physical and spiritual survival. (Gelb)

Through O’Neill’s efforts, American stage matured during the 1920s, developing into a cultural medium that could stand proud among the other art forms.
Arthur Miller (1915–2005)

Arthur Miller had his first theatrical success after World War II with the play All My Sons (1947), an Ibsenesque drama about an airplane engineer who lets a deadly design flaw be ignored because of cost and whose burden of guilt corrodes his family.
However, his Pulitzer Prize-winning Death of a Salesman (1949) is seen as the definitive American tragedy, depicting the demise of the American dream of success and happiness. The play is important for several reasons. The main character, Willy Loman, is a visible failure, a man of little consequence beyond his immediate family, whose life is founded on self-deception and sham:

In this play we see Willy Loman (his surname is, perhaps intentionally, significant) with his wife Linda and his two sons; we trace Willy’s declining confidence and fortunes in middle age: the cheap affair in a hotel room that costs him the affection of his favorite son, Biff; the loss of his job; the suicide attempts that eventually succeed. Poignantly interwoven with these grim de tails are scenes from a happier past, when Willy was younger and successful, when the car was new and when Biff was a high school football star. (Arnott, 479)

When Death of a Salesman opened on Broadway, it touched off a long-lasting debate about whether a play about an ordinary character could be classified as a tragedy. Miller himself weighed in on the debate with his famous essay, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” the manifesto of modern tragedy. In it, he redefines the standard for the tragic hero in the modern world, stating, “The tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal dignity.”
Death of a Salesman makes extensive use of symbols, with each scene containing elements carefully chosen to underline major themes and symbolize Willy’s failures: the broken refrigerator, Linda’s worn stockings (a reminder of his failures both as provider and faithful husband), Biff’s tennis shoes on which he has inked the name of the college he will fail to attend, and the successful young Bernard’s tennis rackets. Expressionist techniques also abound in Miller’s work, although modern audiences are so accustomed to them that rarely does anyone take special notice. The setting designed for the original production seemed to be a naturalistic environment, but it soon revealed itself to be something other. Walls opened or became transparent to reveal scenes from Willy’s past, allowing for seamless transitions as Willy’s mind shifts from one location and time to another. The dream character Uncle Ben moves in and out of the action, at times visible to other characters, at other times visible only to Willy. Sometimes the present action and flashback scenes overlap, with characters’ lines from both scenes skillfully interwoven with one another. A classic expressionist device, the terror of a noisy, repetitive machine, can be felt in the scene where Willy is fired from his job.
Miller wrote other plays about social issues, including The Crucible (1953), a powerful drama about the fear and accusations that fueled the infamous Salem witch trials of 1692. Miller wrote it as an allegory of the McCarthy Senate hearings in the late 1940s and early 1950s, during which many people, including Miller, were interrogated about their alleged Communist sympathies.
Tennessee Williams (Thomas Lanier Williams, 1911–1983)

Tennessee Williams was undoubtedly one of the most popular American playwrights of the twentieth century. All of Williams’ plays combine realism and expressionism. In his earliest and perhaps best-known work, The Glass Menagerie (1944), we see the uncomfortable home of the Wingfield family through the eyes of the son Tom, who acts as a narrator/chorus figure looking back at his past to evoke scenes from his youth.

We see Amanda, his mother, clinging pathetically to memories of a vanished gentility and anxious that her daughter should have a ‘gentleman caller;’ Laura, the daughter, withdrawn into her own world and seeking comfort in the collection of glass animals that gives the play its title; and Tom himself, increasingly estranged from his family and finally leaving it to make some sort of life for himself (Arnott 479).

The characters and the play situation resemble Williams’ family and much of his early life in St. Louis. The play contains notes on music, lighting, and pantomime, as well as character descriptions that are rooted in Freudian psychoanalysis. Williams’ other major works include A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954), Sweet Bird of Youth (1954), and Night of the Iguana (1961).