Chapter 5 – Theatrical Writing: Perspectives and Forms

If art reflects life it does so with special mirrors.

—Bertolt Brecht

Chapter Summary

• Playwrights use a variety of dramatic forms to express their understanding of human experience.

• Tragedy and comedy are the oldest and most familiar forms, but there are many other ways to classify plays and to label the playwright’s vision—the way he or she perceives life in theatrical terms.

Drama’s Perspectives

• Drama’s forms fall into several categories:– Tragedy– Comedy– Tragicomedy– Melodrama– Farce– Epic – Absurd

Drama’s Perspectives

• Dramatic forms reflect ways of understanding human experience.

• Each form provides clues as to how the play should be understood.

Tragedy

• More than an unhappy ending:– Makes a statement about human frailty

• Well-known tragedies:– Oedipus the King, Sophocles– Medea, Euripides– Hamlet, Shakespeare– Ghosts, Henrik Ibsen– Death of A Salesman, Arthur Miller– Streetcar Named Desire, Tennessee Williams

Tragedy

• Tragic hero:– Chooses opposition rather than compromise– Freely chooses his or her fate– Inevitably experiences a fall (a transition from

happiness to pain)– Asserts will and intellect against imperfect world

• Tragic realization:– Usually takes two forms:

• Despite suffering and calamity, order exists.• In a random and indifferent universe, the hero’s

struggle is admirable.

Tragedy

• Aristotle on tragedy:– The Poetics (c. 335-323 BC)– Tragedy “an imitation of an action”– Tragic hero of good character (but not too good) – Hero’s fall brought about by some flaw or error– Inspires pity and fear, which leads to catharsis

(purging of emotion)

Tragedy

• Euripides’ Medea:– Medea wants revenge on husband, Jason, who has

left her and married another woman.– She murders Jason’s new wife and father-in-law.– Wishing to completely ruin Jason, Medea murders

their two sons and escapes to Athens.

Tragedy

• Euripides’ Medea:– Depicts unreliable world in which nothing and no one

may be counted upon:

. . . What we thought Is not confirmed and what we thought not God Contrives. And so it happens in this story.

—Euripides, Medea

Comedy

• The comic playwright is interested in society:– Social values– People as social beings– How to live in society

• Deviation and comedy:– Unlike in tragedy, deviation from social expectations

is scorned.– Individual will is a threat to social order. – Harmony is the central value.

Comedy Differences between Comedy and Tragedy

Tragedy

Individual

Death

Error

Suffering

Pain

Separation

Inflexible

Defeat

Comedy

Society

Endurance

Folly

Joy

Pleasure

Union/Reunion

Flexible

Survival

Comedy

• Comedic vision:– Sanity, reason, moderation– Usually ends in a celebration of life and union:

• Wedding• Dance• Banquet

– Shakespeare: “All’s well that ends well”

Comedy

• Moliere’s Tartuffe:– Disguised as a priest, Tartuffe ingratiates himself to

the merchant Orgon and his mother, who take him in.– All but Orgon and his mother recognize Tartuffe as a

fake.– Orgon offers Tartuffe his daughter’s hand in marriage.– When Tartuffe attempts to seduce Elmire, Orgon’s

wife, she vows to expose his depravity.– By the time he is found out, Tartuffe throws the family

out of the house and attempts to have them arrested.– Tartuffe is arrested instead and taken to prison.

Comedy

• Moliere’s Tartuffe:– Play ends with resolution of family conflicts.– The society at the end of the play is freer and less

rigid than at the beginning.

• Comic vision:– Human error stems from folly.– Conflict will end in resolution, for the better of society.

Tragicomedy

• Traditional tragicomedy:– Mixed dramatic form– Serious or potentially tragic work that ends well– Shakespeare’s tragicomedies:

• All’s Well that Ends Well• Winter’s Tale

• Modern tragicomedy:– Play with mixed moods (Chekhov’s “quiet

desperation”)– Endings indeterminate—neither tragic nor comic

Tragicomedy

• Examples of modern tragicomedy:– Three Sisters, Anton Chekhov:

• Characters endure unfulfilling marriage, work, family.

• Only option is survival: “We’ve got to live.”

Tragicomedy

• Examples of modern tragicomedy:– Waiting for Godot, Samuel

Beckett:• Characters wait for someone

who never arrives.• Humor and energy mixed with

anguish and despair.• Characters laugh at their plight

without being able to change it.

Waiting for Godot

(c) Robbie Jack/ C

OR

BIS

Tragicomedy

• Modern “American” tragicomedy:– Depicts characters who are amusing and serious

without being foolish or superficial– Angels in America, Tony Kushner:

• Transcends indeterminate endings typical of modern tragicomedy

• Replaces despair with idea of social change

Melodrama

• Combination of music and drama in which dialogue is delivered over musical background:– Pygmalion, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• 19th century melodrama:– Serious play – Usually about a character who faces death or ruin at

the hands of a villain– Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe

Melodrama

• Melodramatic vision:– Struggles are external, not internal.– Hero triumphs when pushed to the extreme.– Endings clear-cut, unambiguous.– Melodrama represents the way we see the world most

of the time:• Failures attributed to external factors, faults of

others

Farce

• Depends on skillfully exploited situation, not character development (comedy of situation)

• Presents life as mechanical, aggressive, and coincidental

• Characters:– Two-dimensional: broad outlines– Reminder that fools and impostors exist alongside the

noble and virtuous• “Extreme exaggeration of parody” (Eugene Ionesco)

Farce

• The “psychology” of farce (Eric Bentley):– Allows us to experience social taboos without

consequence:• Violence without harm• Adultery without consequence• Brutality without reprisal• Aggression without risk

– Appeals to audience’s secret thoughts and innermost fantasies

– Way for audience to indulge antisocial fantasies

Farce

• Eugene Ionesco’s The Chairs:– An elderly man and woman frantically fill empty stage

with chairs.– They are preparing for the arrival of an Orator.– When the Orator arrives, the couple hurl themselves

out of windows to their deaths. – Only then does the audience learn that the Orator is

mute.• Interpretation:

– Ionesco’s way of portraying world without meaning

Bertolt Brecht: Epic Theatre

• Reaction against theatrical Western traditions• Wanted to represent historical process in theatre:

– Thought of stage as platform for debate of political and social issues

– Rejected “well made” play: • Epic theatre episodic and linear (like history)

• Characters:– Represent individuals and collective beings:

• Specific and allegorical at the same time– Social function key to identity, characterization

Bertolt Brecht: Epic Theatre

• Epic theatre as eyewitness account:– Actors should differentiate from characters. – Actor/eyewitness never becomes character/victim.– Actors are free to comment on characters.

• The alienation effect:– Jarring audience out of sympathetic feelings for

characters– Encourages audience to be objective, to think

Absurdist Theatre

• Presents irrational situations without comment or judgment

• Characteristics:– Unrecognizable plots– Mechanical characters– Incoherent dialogue– Dream/nightmare scenarios

• Gives audience a sense of being in an absurd universe

Absurdist Theatre

• Eugene Ionesco:– “[The absurd] is anything without a goal . . . When

man is cut off from his religious or metaphysical roots, he is lost; all his struggles become senseless futile and oppressive.”

– “Meaning” simply what happens onstage– Plays:

• The Chairs• The Bald Soprano• The Rhinoceros

Absurdist Theatre

• The “American” absurd:– Edward Albee’s The Zoo Story:

• Introduced the absurd to American playwriting

Core Concepts

• Dramatic forms reflect the playwright’s vision and sentiments about the world.

• Genres are theatrical ways of labeling a playwright’s view of the world’s substance, shape, and meaning.