Modern American Drama
What is theater? Crash Course Theater #1
Define theater
- Dionyus ~ Greek god of theater
- Theater: it’s a place in which a play is performed
~ Greek origin, means: “the seeing place”
- Can be: big/small, indoors/outdoors, purpose-built/borrowed
- Plays can be performed in different places, not just in a theatre ~ e.g. in a park, in a
parking lot, in a private home etc.
- The word ‘theatre’ refers to:
o the performance of plays
o the body of the literature and other documentation that has accompanied it
- Closet drama: not written to be performed
- Improvise plays: do not have a script
- Familiar definition: theater requires – at least 1 actor + at least 1 audience member
- Actor
o mostly human
o but can be: robots, animals, puppets
- John Cage: “Theatre takes place all the time, wherever one is; an art simply facilitates
persuading one this is the case” almost everything is theatre?
- “What is theatre?” – the question is controversial
narrowed definition:
Theater is a deliberate performance created by live actors and intended for a live
audience, typically making use of scripted language
- Spelling question: theatre / theater – both of them are fine
o theatre: more common outside of the US
- Origin of theatre is controversial, but there are theories
o In the West, up until 6th/ 7th century BCE: no theater, but religious ritual
ritual
they can get pretty theatrical
often ways of mediating between the human and the
supernatural
serve to enact/ re-enact significant events in the human or
supernatural world ~ e. g. births, marriages, death, harvests
Mircea Eliade:“ the time of the event that the ritual
commemorates or reenacts is made present ”
= represents (literally re-presents) old stories /ideas and makes
them happen now
ritual ≠ theater (they are NOT IDENTICAL)
RITUAL THEATER
- is sacred - is usually secular
both can draw on similar mythological sources, but
- typically treat those - typically treat those
sources as fact sources as fiction
- the audience often - the audience usually sit
participates politely
o Late 19th century: scientific approach to the origin of theater
Anthropological approachtheatre as a direct evolution of a religious
ritual
James Frazer + Cambridge Ritualists– looked around in ‘primitive
societies’ in Africa & Asia
theater had emerged as a sophisticated refining of ritual
(=ritualism)
starts with worshipping some kind of god / practice
that worship gets distilled into rituals to attract the attention of
that god / to guarantee good fortune
once your primitive society really gets going rituals generate
myths
those myths get transmuted into theater
Marshall McLuhan (media theorist): “Art became a sort of civilized
substitute for magical games and rituals…art like game became a
mimetic echo of and a relief from the old magic of total involvement”
Support this idea - Herodotus (Greek historian)
BUT Frazer and the other ritualist did a lot of non-scientific guessing-
they worked backward from what they knew about classical theatre
and hypothesizing about what kinds of rituals may have produced it
Frazer also operates with the underlying belief that all societies
basically evolve in the same way (not true)
=>this is problematic ~the name of the view is ‘positivism’
o Another theory (that gets going after Frazer’s): people create myths out of a
desire to explain and rationalize the world around them
ritualism: myths and theater emerge as response to pre-existing rituals
in this theory: myths serve an etiological function, a way of explaining
how & why things came to be the way they are (=functionalism)
Bronislaw Malinowsky: “Myth is a statement od primeval reality which
lives in the institutions and pursuits of a community. It justifies by
precedent the existing order ”
functionalists - not assume that all societies operate and evolve the
same way / will create the same kinds of myths
Malinowsky’s followers discussed theater – their idea: many early
Greek dramas have their origins in myths ~ some of those myths are
etiological
~ e.g. ‘Oresteia’ – explains the legal system, ‘Prometheus Bound’ –
explains that how we get fire and technology
If myths explains the world and theater based on myththeater as a
way of explaining the world to ourselves – this view has some
drawbacks
~ e. g. the earliest recorded plays Aeschylus’s ‘The Persians’ – based
on contemporaneous historical events (not in myth)
o Another theory: theater derives at least on part from the clown figure – who
is sort of the secular equivalent pf the shaman (#Odorics) in early societies
their job was the make fun of the headman and other establishment
figures and practices
~ see the influence in satyr plays
linked to the idea the theater may originate from games and the
playful instinct of humankind – ‘ludic impulse’
o Another theory – gets going with Aristotle: human beings have a “mimetic
impulse” ~ an in-built desire to imitate, to act, to pretendthat is how we
learn
according to Aristotle: this desire gets refined and codified into
theater
Why theater is important?
- Percy Shelley: “The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the
drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the
knowledge of itself.”
