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Chapter 12
Modern Theatre
Western Influence on World Theatre

Spoken Drama in
 India
 China
 Japan
 The
Arab World
 Pre-colonial Africa
The Advent of Realism
Antecedents
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William Fox Talbot (1800-1877)
 Invented the photographic negative around 1840
Thomas Edison
 Invented the incandescent light bulb in 1879
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
 Wrote about evolution in The Origin of Species in 1859
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
 Critiqued capitalism and other aspects of the Industrial
revolution in Das Kapital in 1867
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
 Wrote about the complexity of human psychology in The
Interpretation of Dreams in 1900
August Strindberg (1849-1912)
 Problem plays
Realism in the Modern Theatre
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Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)
 Father of Realism
 A Doll’s House (1879)
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)
 Moscow Art Theatre
 The Seagull (1896)
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)
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The Importance of Being
Earnest (1895)
George Bernard Shaw (18561950)
 Pygmalion (1912)
Box Sets and Fourth Walls
 Olympic Theatre in London
Oscar Wilde
Naturalism in the Theatre
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Emile Zola (1840-1902)
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Maxim Gorky (1868-1936)
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Naturalism as a documentary of everyday life
“Slice of life,” or photographic reality
The Lower Depths (1902)
André Antoine, (1858-1943)
Theatre Libre
 Comedies rosses
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Avant-garde Theatre
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Definition
 To
be ahead of
 To experiment with
 To break conventional expectations
 To explore new realities
Avant-garde Theatre
Symbolism/Futurism
Impressionism/Expressionism
Symbolism – emphasized the suggestive and
metaphoric over the literal and real
 Futurism – glorified power and speed of the
Industrial revolution
 Impressionism – emphasized the subjectivity of
perception over that of objectivity
 Expressionism – used subjective theatrical
metaphors to create a sense of how a character
experiences his or her subjective reality
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Elmer Rice’s (1892-1967) The Adding Machine (1923)
Eugene O’Neill’s (1888-1953) The Hairy Ape (1922)
Avant-garde Theatre
Dadaism and Surrealism
Dadaism – made us of sound poems and
nonliteral images to underscore the madness of
their perception of the reality of World War I
 Surrealism – sought to portray the fantastic
images associated with the unconscious mind as
a way by which to reveal deeper realities
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Theatre of Cruelty
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Antonin Artuad (1896-1948)
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The Theatre and Its Double (1938)
Avant-Garde Theatre
Absurdism
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Absurdism
Fatalist
Samuel Beckett (1906-1989)
 Waiting for Godot (1953)
 Endgame (1957)
Existentialist
Jean-Paul Sarte (1905-1980)
 No Exit (1943)
Hilarious
Eugene Ionesco (1912-1994)
 The Bald Soprano (1949)
 Rhinoceros (1959)
Avant-Garde Theatre
Epic Theatre
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Epic Theatre
 Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
 Emphasis on the underlining causes for a story
rather than the story itself
 Alienation effect – distancing the audience from
theatrical illusion so they can analyze and discuss
the reasons for what is happening to the
characters on the stage
 Understands that all art is fundamentally political
and that the artist and his audience share
responsibility for that fact of life
 The Three Penny Opera (1928) and Mother
Courage and Her Children (1941)
American Theatre 1945- 1960
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Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
 Death of a Salesman (1949)
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Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
 The Glass Menagerie (1945)
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Mixes Realism with
Expressionism
Poetic realism
Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965)
 A Raisin in the Sun (1959)
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Employs Realism to dramatize
the plight of an AfricanAmerican family in Chicago in
the 1950s
American Theatre in the 1960s
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Little Theatre Movement
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Off-Broadway
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Staged noncommercial productions of artistically important plays
in small theatres
Off-off-Broadway
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Subscription audience based theatres that permitted American to
see example of the “new stagecraft” artists from Europe and
America
Staged noncommercial productions that are often experimental
in theatres of 99 seats or less
Happenings
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Jerzy Grotowski (1933-1999) and the Polish Lab Theatre
Contemporary Theatre:
Regional Theatre
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Alley Theatre in Houston
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First permanent professional regional theatre in the
U.S. founded in 1947 by Margo Jones
Others include:
Arena Theatre in Washington, D.C.
 Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis
 Actors Theatre of Louisville
 Mark Taper Forum in Los Angles
 Alliance Theatre in Atlanta
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Contemporary Theatre:
Performance Art
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Characteristics
 mixes theatre, visual arts, music, dance,
gesture and ritual
 Rejects traditional elements of drama such as
plot, dialogue, characters and setting
 Most interested in conveying a state of being
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Examples of Performance Artists include:
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Laurie Anderson
Tim Miller
Contemporary Theatre:
Political and Cultural Theatre
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David Henry Hwang (b. 1957)
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Caryl Churchill (b. 1938)
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Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Oleanna (1992)
August Wilson (1945-2005)
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Cloud Nine (1979) and Top Girls (1982)
David Mamet
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M. Butterfly (1988)
Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) to Golf (2005)
Sam Shepard (b. 1943)
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Buried Child (1978) and Fool for Love (1982)
Contemporary Theatre:
Recent Nobel Prize Winning
Playwrights
Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)
 Dario Fo (Italy)
 Goa Xingjian (China)
 Harold Pinter (England)
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