Chapter 4 Twentieth Century drama

So far you have been reading about the origins and growth of drama. In this chapter we will discuss how drama became a major literary force in the hands of three innovative practitioners; and how the mid and late 20th century witnessed an upsurge in theatrical experimentation. Arguably, the three most revered figures of 20th-century drama are the American Eugene ONeill (1888-1953), the German Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and the Italian Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936). ONeills plays got him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1936 and indicated the peak of American drama. Brecht wrote dramas of ideas, usually promulgating socialist or Marxist theory. In order to make his audience more intellectually receptive to his ideas, he used expressionist techniques to make them continually aware that they were watching a play. Likewise for Pirandello, it was important to qualify his plays as theater, and the major philosophical concern of his dramas is the distinction between illusion and reality.

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) Innovative German playwright, theatre director, theoretician, who was influential in the realm of political playwriting and is remembered for a unique style of theatre-the Alienation effect. For Brecht, the purpose of a play is not entertainment or imitation of reality but to present ideas and invite audience to judge; while his characters do not mimic people but represent opposing sides of argument. It must be remembered that the audience are always aware of watching a play. The one tribute we can pay the audience is to treat it as thoroughly intelligent. It is utterly wrong to treat people as simpletons when they are grown up at seventeen. I appeal to the reason, was Brechts belief.

QUIZ I Answer in brief: i. What was the purpose of the theatre , according to Brecht? ii. What is the major idea in the plays of Luigi Pirandello?

Theater and World War II WW II and its horrors produced a widespread sense of the utter meaninglessness of human existence, a sense forcefully expressed in plays that are known to us as the theater of the absurd. By abandoning traditional devices of the drama, including logical plot development, meaningful dialogue, and intelligible characters, absurdist playwrights sought to convey modern humanitys feelings of bewilderment, alienation, and despair. Two of the most famous plays of the theater of the absurd are Eugene Ionescos Bald Soprano (1950) and Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot (1953). The sources of the theater of the absurd can be found in the principles of surrealism, Dadaism, and existentialism; in the traditions of the music hall, vaudeville, and burlesque. The category will be discussed in greater depth in the chapter titled Theatre of the Absurd. Waiting for Godot, portrays two tramps whiling away the time on an empty road, endlessly waiting for the protagonist of the title. Their master, and Lucky, his slave, who pass through once in each act, their dependency on each other, which is reversed during the interval. Metaphorically they catch the essence of our indifference and cruelty to our own kind, so different from the solidarity of animals with their own species. Beckett dramatizes one of the most universal traumas of our time, the fear of anonymity. Religion no longer holds out any compensation, except to a few. This vital and poignant message in Godot, which surfaces again in Becketts later work, became apparent only from his own production with the Berlin Schiller Theater. After the widespread success of Waiting for Godot, the most discussed play of the 1950s Beckett was commissioned to write a radio play for the BBC; All that Fall (1957. This was followed by Fin de partie (Endgame, 1957), which received mixed reviews. The controversy revolved round the plays claustrophobic atmosphere and the apparent eccentricity of its stage situations, two of its characters being immured in dustbins during the whole of the action Endgame is about the acceptance of death, a poignant and poetic melodrama that requires acting of the highest possible standard; the grandeur of its language and the power of its compassion can traumatize an audience. Unusual stage

imagery is also characteristic of Happy Days (1961), Play (1964) and Come and Go (1966), all written for the stage. In Happy Days, Winnie is a middle-aged woman embedded up to the waist in a mound of earth, trying to ignore her situation while carrying on a desultory conversation with her husband; in the second act she has been sucked down until only her head remains free. Play shows the audience three dimly lit heads emerging from urns, each responding to a light that flashes from one face to the other; each recounts his part in a domestic drama where a man is trapped between his wife and his mistress. In Krapps Last Tape (1958), the playwright achieved something close to autobiography.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Beckett wrote a series of highly concentrated one-act plays, highly experimental and incorporating unusual visual effects and depicting the protagonists in some kind of claustrophobic hell. Not I depicts a mouth, suspended in space, relating a womans story, denying it is her own, to an inquisitor (who was later dropped in some productions and in the television version). That Time (1976) has an Irish immigrant on his deathbed, seen from above. Footfalls (1976) is about a ghost, probably existing only in the imagination of her dying mother, whose imaginary daughter will remember her and create more ghosts to keep her memory alive into the future. Rockaby (1981) pictures a woman rocking herself grimly to death. Ohio Impromptu (1981) shows the audience two identical old men, one a ghostly nocturnal visitor: one reads to the other from an old book the tale of a loved lost one. In Catastrophe (1982), a play in support of the dissident Czech playwright Vaclav Havel, an actor is reduced by a dictatorial director to an impotent but defiant statue in Becketts most direct political statement about artistic and political freedom. What Where (1983) examines the impossibility of believing information derived by force in an extraordinary drama of self-torture.

Theater of the Absurd and Experiments in the 20th century Theatre The pessimism and despair of the 20th century found expression in the existentialist dramas of Jean-Paul Sartre, in the realistic and symbolic dramas of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet and Jean Anouilh, and also in Jean Cocteau. Akin to the theater of the absurd is the so-called theater of cruelty, derived from the ideas of Antonin Artaud, who, writing in the 1930s, anticipated a drama that would assault its audience with movement and sound, producing a shocking reaction (more on this will be

discussed in subsequent chapters). After the violence of World War II and the overwhelming threat of the atomic bomb, his approach seemed particularly appropriate to many playwrights. Elements of the theater of cruelty can be found in the cruel acts and abusive language of John Osbornes Look Back in Anger (1956) and Edward Albees Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), in specific works of Genet, in the silences of Harold Pinter and in Peter Weisss drama of sadomasochism, Marat/Sade. Realism and satire are the hallmarks of the works of John Guare and Jason Miller, surrealism characterized some of the late 20th century theater, particularly in the works of Tom Stoppard, Sam Shepard and David Mamet, in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (1967), Buried Child (1978) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1984 ), respectively. The late decades of the 20th century were also a time of considerable experiment and iconoclasm. Experimental dramas of the 1960s and 70s by such groups as the Living Theater and Polish Laboratory Theatre were followed by a mixing and merging of various kinds of media with aspects of postmodernism (you will read in detail about this phenomenon), improvisational techniques, performance art, and other kinds of avantgarde theater. Afro-American playwrights asserted their identity with Lorraine Hansberrys A Raisin in the Sun (1959. This continued with the 1960s plays such as James Baldwin's Blues for Mr. Charley (1964), Amiri Barakas ragingly controversial Dutchman (1964) explored the harsh realities of the black American life. One of the most distinctive and prolific of the centurys African-American playwrights, August Wilson explored the black American identity in his plays. Gay themes also made their presence felt during the later decades of the 20th cent. Homosexual characters had been treated in such earlier 20th-century American works as Lillian Hellmans The Childrens Hour (1934), a play where a scheming young girl ruins two school teachers by allegations of lesbianism; and Robert Andersons Tea and Sympathy (1953). Interestingly though the words gay/lesbian never really appears in both works. Gay subjects were earlier treated farcically till the famous Stonewall riots in America, The Boys in the Band (1968). In later years gay experience was explored with greater depth and sympathy, particularly in David Henry Hwangs M. Butterfly (1988), and Paul Rudnicks Jeffrey (1993). Tony Kushner's acclaimed two-part Angels in America in the early 90s is a startling treatment of the contemporary gay world, apart from being a pastiche of supernatural elements and historical events, such as the McCarthy period.

QUIZ II 1. Answer the following in brief: i. What is theater of cruelty?

ii. Name any two important plays about gay themes. iii. Who are the main characters in Waiting for Godot? iv. Mention any two experimental techniques employed by Beckett in his later plays.

Assignment Attempt a character study of Roy Cohn from Tony Kushners Angels in America.

Suggested links 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_theatre 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avant-garde_theatre