Download Chapter 4 2oth Century Drama

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
O’Neill (1888-1953), the German Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and the Italian Luigi
Pirandello (1867-1936). O’Neill’s 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 Brecht’s 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 humanity’s feelings of bewilderment, alienation, and despair.
Two of the most famous plays of the theater of the absurd are Eugene Ionesco’s Bald
Soprano (1950) and Samuel Beckett’s 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 Beckett’s 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 1950’s
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 play’s 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 Krapp’s 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 woman’s 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 Beckett’s 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 Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956) and Edward Albee’s
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), in specific works of Genet, in the silences of
Harold Pinter and in Peter Weiss’s 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 Hansberry’s A Raisin in
the Sun (1959. This continued with the 1960s plays such as James Baldwin's Blues for
Mr. Charley (1964), Amiri Baraka’s ragingly controversial Dutchman (1964) explored
the harsh realities of the black American life. One of the most distinctive and prolific of
the century’s 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 Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), a play where a scheming young girl ruins
two school teachers by allegations of lesbianism; and Robert Anderson’s 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 Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1988),
and Paul Rudnick’s 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 Kushner’s Angels in America.
Suggested links
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_theatre
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avant-garde_theatre