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

12 Chapter 1 What Is Theatre?
ART
The word art brings to mind a host of abstract ideas:
creativity, imagination, elegance, power, harmony, and
beauty. We expect a work of art to capture something of
the human spirit and to touch upon familiar, yet elusive,
meanings in life. Certainly great theatre never fails to
bring together many of these ideas. In great theatre we
glimpse not only the physical and emotional exuberance
of play, but also the deep yearnings that propel humanity’s
search for purpose, meaning, and a life well lived.
Art is one of the great pursuits of humanity. It
uniquely integrates our emotions with our intellects and
our aesthetics with our revelations. It empowers both
those who make it and those who appreciate it. And it
sharpens thought and focuses feeling by mixing reality
with imagination. Think of a great work of art that you
love: a song that makes you fight back tears or jump
up and down in excitement, or a poem that expresses
familiar emotions—like love or sadness—in new ways.
We are drawn to works of art like these because they
lend meaning to our lives. We might find similar values
in religion as well, but art is accessible without subscribing
to any particular set of beliefs. It is surely for
this reason that all great religions—both Eastern and
Western—have employed art and artworks (including
dramatic art) in their liturgies and services from the
earliest of times.
IMPERSONATION
The fundamental quality of theatre is that it involves
actors impersonating characters. This feature is unique
to the theatre and separates it from poetry, painting,
sculpture, music, performance art, cabaret acts, and other
artistic activities.
When we see an actor impersonate a character, we
know, on some level, that the character is not “real.” But
oftentimes we act like she is. We react as if an actual person
were going through real emotions. It can be tricky,
then, on a more subjective and emotional level, to separate
the actor from the character. Even today, TV fans
send tweets to celebrities, or leave Facebook messages
on actors’ pages, to express their feelings about the people
they play, not the people they are. Movie fans clutter
message boards with theories as to what a certain character
“means” or what fate might befall them after the
closing credits, as if they were real people.
Imagine how confusing this must have been in the
early days of theatre! The very first plays and audiences
didn’t have centuries of conventions to remind them that
an actor was not a character. How could they separate
the performer from the fiction? The solution the ancient
world found was the mask. Western theatre had its true
beginning that day in ancient Greece when an actor first
stepped out of the chorus, placed an unpainted mask over
his face, and thereby signaled that the lines he was about
Plays are a form of art, and many
plays are about artists. John
Logan’s Tony-award-winning Red,
about the painter Mark Rothko,
takes place in the artist’s studio in
the 1950s, as Rothko (Alfred Molina,
right) instructs and berates his
assistant Ken, played by Jonathan
Groff, at the Los Angeles Mark
Taper Forum in 2012. © Gina Ferazzi,
Los Angeles Times