Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

Theatre 215
universe, is swept up in a swarm of interstellar movements.
Later scientists would press further than that,
until eventually the revelations of Albert Einstein, Werner
Heisenberg, and others would remove our sense of
stability and establish the human animal as little more
than a cluster of kinetic energy wobbling in an atomic
field, marked by galaxies and black holes, neutrinos and
quarks, matter and antimatter, all in a dance of inexplicable
origin and doubtful destiny.
Nor was that “human animal” so vastly privileged
over other species, it would seem. Charles Darwin would
argue that we Homo sapiens are directly linked to
other mammals—descended not from Adam and Eve or
pagan demigods but from prehistoric apes. Our morals
and religions, anthropologist Ruth Benedict would
argue, were not handed down to all humanity from a
single source but are instead a collection of laws and
traditions that depend on the climates and cultures we
inhabit. The work of Sigmund Freud would posit the
existence of the unconscious, a dark and lurking inner
self filled with infantile urges, primordial fantasies, and
suppressed fears and rages. Friedrich Nietzsche would
argue that “there are no facts, only interpretations.” The
writings of Karl Marx would contend that social behavior
has its basis in economic greed, class struggle, and
political manipulation. “Everlasting uncertainty and
agitation” is the nature of human interaction, according
to Marx, and society comprises “two great hostile
camps,” the haves and have-nots, continually engaged
in civil war.
These and scores of other serious challenges to traditional
thinking were accompanied everywhere by
public debate and dispute. By the turn of the twentieth
century, an investigative drive seized Western civilization:
data were collected on every conceivable topic,
and scientific questioning and testing replaced intuition
and dogma as the accepted avenues to truth. Experimentation,
exploration, documentation, and challenge
became the marching orders of the artist and intellectual
alike.
The modern theatre has its roots in these political,
social, and intellectual revolutions. Ever since its outset
it has been a theatre of challenge, a theatre of experimentation.
It has never been a theatre of rules or simple
messages, nor has it been a theatre of gods, heroes, or
villains. It has reflected, to a certain degree, the confusions
of its times, but it has also struggled to clarify and
to illuminate, to document and explore human destiny in
a complex universe.
Realism
Thus far, the movement that has had the most pervasive
and long-lived effect on modern theatre is, beyond
question, realism. Realism has sought to create a
drama without conventions or abstractions. Likeness to
life is realism’s goal, and in pursuit of that goal it has
renounced, among other things, idealized settings, stylized
versifications, contrived endings, and ornate costumes
and performance styles.
Realism is a difficult aesthetic philosophy to define.
In a way, the theatre has always taken “real life” as its
fundamental subject, so realism seems at first glance to
be the perfect style with which to approach the reality
of existence. Instead of having actors represent characters,
the realists would say, let us have the actors be those
characters. Instead of having dialogue stand for conversation,
let us have dialogue that is conversation. Instead
of having scenery and costumes that convey a sense of
time and place and atmosphere, let us have scenery that is
genuinely inhabitable and costumes that are real clothes.
But, of course, realism has its limits: any dramatic
piece must inevitably involve a certain shaping and stylization,
no matter how lifelike its effects, and advocates
of theatrical realism are well aware of this fact. Realism
might seem like the rejection of style, but realism is also
itself a style, as careful and deliberate as any other. And
the stylization and ideology of realism were tested, during
the last years of the nineteenth century and the first
years of the twentieth, in every aspect of theatre—acting,
directing, design, and playwriting. The results of those
tests form a meaningful body of theatre and a style that
remains enormously significant.
A LABORATORY
In essence, the realistic theatre aspired to be a laboratory
in which the nature of relationships or the ills of society
are “objectively” set down for the final judgment of
an audience of impartial observers. In its purest form,
realistic theatre should strictly adhere to the “scientific
method” of the laboratory. Nothing must ring false. The
setting must resemble the prescribed locale of the play as
closely as possible, even if that means the scenery comes
from a real-life environment and is simply transported
onto the stage. Characters’ costumes in the realistic theatre
follow the dress of “real” people of similar societal
status; dialogue re-creates the cadences and expressions
of daily life.