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

216 Chapter 8 The Modern Theatre
Brian Dennehey (left) and Nathan Lane are two of America’s greatest modern actors, each having won two Tony Awards
to date. Here they are shown arguing in a barroom—the play’s only setting—in Eugene O’Neill’s powerful The Iceman
Cometh, written in 1939. Restaged on Broadway by Robert Falls in 2015 (following his 2012 production at Chicago’s
Goodman Theatre), the play lasted nearly five hours and received rapturous reviews and responses from critics and
audiences. © Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux
Early in the realist movement, the proscenium stage
of the Romantic era was modified to accommodate scenery
constructed in box sets: three fully visible walls that
featured real bookcases, windows, fireplaces, swinging
doors, and so forth, built just as they are in a house interior.
The audience felt as if they were eavesdropping and
witnessing interactions within an actual private home. In
the same vein, realistic acting was judged effective insofar
as it was drawn from the behavior of life and insofar
as the actors seemed to be genuinely speaking to each
other instead of playing to the audience. A new aesthetic
principle had spawned: the “theatre of the fourth wall
removed” in which the life onstage was conceived to be
the same as life in a real-world setting, except that, in the
case of the stage, one wall—the proscenium opening—
had been removed. Thus the theatre was like a laboratory
microscope and the stage like a biologist’s slide: a
living environment presented for careful inspection by
curious observers.
Realism presents its audience with an abundance of
seemingly real-life “evidence” and permits each spectator
to arrive at her or his own conclusions. There is some
shaping of this evidence by author and performer alike,
to be sure, but much of the excitement of the realistic
theatre is occasioned by the genuine interpretive freedom
it allows the audience and by the accessibility of
its characters.
And yet while characters were familiar, they were also
complex—much like we all are in real life. In presenting
its evidence from the surface of life, realism encourages
us to delve into the mystery that lies beneath it. Realism’s
characters are defined by detail rather than by symbol
or abstract idealization: like people we know, they
are ultimately unpredictable—humanly messy rather