Theatre History

Part 1Ancient TheatreEast and West

The Greeks

Western Theatre emerged as part of the festival of Dionysus—god of wine, fertility, and revelry

Tragedy was introduced in 534 BCE Comedy and the Satyr Play in 486 BCE Plays were presented in competition with

awards for best actors and plays

The Greeks Aeschylus (c. 500 BCE) is the oldest KNOWN

Greek playwright and is responsible for introducing the second actor into Greek drama

Sophocles (c. 450 BCE) utilized a still larger cast and is noted for his Oedipus.

Euripides (c. 450 BCE) had the most enduring popularity of the Greek playwrights although his work was controversial in his day for its modernism.

The Greeks Greek Theatre featured one or several lead

actors and a chorus who reflected on the action and played a fictional role.

Greek actors performed in masks that covered their full faces.

Performances took place in an amphitheatre.

The Romans

The Romans adopted a great deal of Greek culture, including mythology and theatre.

Roman tragedy resembled Greek tragedy except the violence took place on stage rather than off.

Seneca (C. 30 BCE) was among the most prominent tragedians. In Thyestes, the title character eats the flesh of his children, and in Oedipus, Jocasta cuts out her womb and Oedipus blinds himself onstage.

The Romans

Roman Comedy was much more popular and centralized that Greek comedy, and appealed widely to the masses.

Plautus (c. 200 BCE) and Terence (170 BCE) were the most famous.

Roman Comedy drew on inverting roles, mistaken identities, and became the prototype for the situation comedies that predominate in TV, Film, and onstage today.

Roman comedies cut the chorus.

India

The Natyasastra was one of the earliest texts on theatrical practice and described how to perform sanskrit drama, focusing on the “rasa” or flavor the audience should take from a play.

Shakuntala is acknowledged as a masterwork of Indian drama and features the pursuit of a magical ring set with a large number of characters and locations.

China

Folk entertainment was an element of earliest Chinese culture including skits, pantomimes, juggling, singing, and dancing.

Later (1000 CE), variety plays developed, performed by traveling theatrical troupes that resembled twentieth-century vaudeville.

Nanxi became the prototype for future Chinese theatre with the development of four character types: sheng (male), dan (female), jing (painted face),and chou (clown). Nanxi have developed into the popular Beijing Opera in China today.

Africa and the Americas

Tribal cultures in Africa and the Americas held a uniform belief in the power of the shamans.

The shaman was called to her or his task by supernatural forces and/or a personal tragedy or illness.

The shaman healed physical, psychological, and social grievances by enacting elaborate rituals that often involved portraying a journey to the spirit world or undergoing a possession by spirits or deities.

Africa and the Americas

Rituals—annual or shamanic—often included the masked portrayal of particular figures, gods, or forces of nature.

Medieval Theatre

Mystery Plays: dramatized biblical events from the creation to the last judgment as well as stories of the lives of Christian saints. They were meant to appeal to a popular audience: written in the vernacular (common tongue) and staged outdoors.

Cycles: When several Mystery Plays were presented together as part of a sequence.

Medieval Theatre

Processional Staging: Mystery plays were presented on a wagon that toured around.

Stationary Staging: a series of small scenic “mansions” stood side by side in a stationary location.

Anti-Theatrical Prejudice

In Europe and Asia, actors were often associated with the lower classes, in part because many actors were drawn from families who could not afford to raise their children and so passed them to a theatrical troupe.

For many Christian detractors, acting was associated with lying or faking and decried for inspiring the population to act inappropriately by portraying violence or conflict.

Actors were often associated with prostitution.

scenes

Seneca, Oedipushttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_32z0k3r9v4

Chinese Beijing Operahttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUmOA_y5p4I&list=PL8E9207D348985755&index=17

Medieval Mystery Playshttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4jFzbS6bn4

Theatre History

Part 2Early Modern

And Modern Theatre

English Renaissance

Playwrights: Christopher Marlowe (c. 1590), Shakespeare (c. 1600), Ben Jonson (c. 1615), John Ford (c. 1620).

There were over a dozen outdoor theaters around London between 1560 and 1640.

Theaters competed with bear-baiting for audiences.

English Renaissance

Theaters were divided into three seating tiers and a yard for the groundlings—working class spectators.

French Neoclassicism

Neoclassism: unities of time (24 hrs), place (single location), and action (single plot) supposedly in the tradition of classical drama—i.e. Roman and Greek.

Jean Racine (c.1660) was a master of neoclassicism with Greek-inspired Phaedra and Andromache

Pierre Corneille (c. 1660) challenged these conventions with plays like Le Cid which crammed an absurd amount of action into 24 hours.

Melodrama

Rose to prominence in 19th Century, especially in America where it reached its epitome with Uncle Tom's Cabin adapted from the novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Term means “song drama” and refers to the musical accompaniment that was played beneath the action.

Emphasis was placed on surface effects: evoking suspense, fear, nostalgia, and other emotions. Heroes and villains were clearly delineated and productions relied on stock characters.

Realism

Henrik Ibsen (c. 1890) is the Norwegian playwright credited with introducing realism to the stage. His plays explored the psychological complexity of his characters in difficult social circumstances including A Doll's House, An Enemy of the People, and Hedda Gabler.

Naturalism sought to bring these experiments to a still further conclusion by displaying a “slice of life”--literally a moment from the character's everyday existence, ideally with some dramatic conflict.

Realism

Konstantin Stanislavskii (c. 1900) developed and popularized the modern realist approach to acting. Coming from a wealthy industrialist family in Russia, he spent years studying the greatest actors of his day and honing his own craft as an actor. He founded the Moscow Art Theatre where he staged the plays of Anton Chekhov (c. 1900) including The Seagull and The Three Sisters.

Political TheatreGeorge Bernard Shaw (c. 1910) developed “the

problem play”--a subset of realism in which the character explore and debate a complex political or social problem like war, religious persecution, or prostitution.

Bertolt Brecht (c. 1940) develop “epic theatre” which explored political and social problems through by preventing the audience from becoming emotionally involved with the characters. Brecht “alienated” or distanced his audience by exposing the artificial mechanisms of the stage and having his actors break out into song.

Political TheatreThe

Alienation or

Distancing

Effect.

Musical Theatre

For many years, melodramas and plays had included songs as a supplemental entertainment.

Hammerstein and Kern's Showboat was one of the first musicals to make the songs a part of the story.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! was the first musical to use the songs to advance the plot.

Avant-GardeIn the early 20th Century, European artists

emerged with the specific goal to challenge the social, political, and aesthetic values of their society.

Dadaists performed poetry composed randomly on the spot and dressed in ungainly cardboard costumes.

Futurists glued audiences to chairs and provoked them into throwing rotten fruit at the stage.

Surrealists brought the dream world of the subconscious onto the stage with illogical sequences of events and outlandish imagery.

Avant-Garde

Dada Futurism

Avant-Garde

In the 1960s, the focus of the avant-garde shifted from Europe to America inspired by Polish director Jerzy Grotowski whose “Poor Theatre” sought to pare the theatre down to the relationship between actor and audience by bringing them closer together.

The Living Theatre (c. 1960) turned his experiments to politics by openly confronting their audiences in their performances and sometimes engaging them in lengthy arguments.

Identity Theatre

Various identity theatres also emerged as part of the American Avant-garde.

The Black Arts movement featured plays that addressed racial injustice, most famously in Amiri Baraka's Dutchman.

The Feminist movement developed plays and solo pieces that addressed gender inequality with plays by figures including Holly Hughes and Lois Weaver.

Identity Theatre

In the 80s and 90s, Hispanic identity theatre emerged, gaining prominence through the work of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino

And gay rights took the stage in solo performances by Holly Hughes and Tim Miller and Tony Kushner's Angels in America.

Identity Theatre

El Teatro Campesino

Amiri Baraka's Dutchman

scenes

Oklahoma!https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C6J9gij5SQ

El Teatro Campesinohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JbVkZr94c&list=PL119F51B9F298BAF8&index=5