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

256 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
Robert Wilson’s The Old Woman, a combination of theatre, dance, and stunning visual design, is performed
here by Willem Dafoe (left) and Mikhail Baryshnikov in its 2013–2014 world tour. © Lucie Jansch
From a practical point of view—looking at stage
practice rather than just ideas—theatre tends to play it
safe, rather than start a new revolution of style or philosophy.
Theatre companies around the world present
plays from the past as well as from their own time and
also conserve many of the theatre’s traditional ways of
working. Nearly all the plays mentioned in the previous
chapters will be performed somewhere in the world
this season, and the vigorous debates among today’s
actors and directors often repeat dialogues from the
days of Aristophanes, Shakespeare, and Stanislavsky.
Nevertheless, in the twenty-first century, a new era
seems to be emerging. The previous century was a
violent one: two world wars, assassinations of political
and cultural leaders (Mohandas Gandhi, Martin
Luther King Jr., John and Robert Kennedy, Anwar
Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, John Lennon), the Holocaust,
the threat of nuclear annihilation and terrorist attack,
the proliferation of dangerous drugs and outbreaks
of lethal diseases, and the threatened destruction of
Earth’s vital resources. The arts responded to these
social changes with an artistic freedom often frightening
in its extremity—nowhere more so than in the theatre,
where by the 1970s Dionysian ecstasy had returned
to the stage with a force almost equal to that of the
ancient Greeks. As play-licensing laws fell in England
and legal censorship became locally unenforceable in
America, profanity, nudity, simulated sex, violence,
and vicious verbal attacks on political institutions—
all unknown on the legitimate stage since ancient
times—became almost commonplace. Plays popular
in America in the last third of the twentieth century
featured accusations of a sitting president of murder
(MacBird), a recent pope of genocide (The Deputy),
eating a dead baby while starving in a war-torn country
(Blasted), teenage boys stoning a baby to death
in its crib (Saved), and actors undressing and marching
naked out into the street (Paradise Now). Some
of this Dionysian frenzy reached right into the theatre’s
mainstream when the “American Tribal Love-
Rock Musical” Hair (1968) ended its first act with its
actors—who had already sung rapturously about “sodomy,
fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty”—brazenly stripping
off all their clothes and facing the audience in a
posture of mocking defiance.
Nor were theatre audiences themselves immune from
such changes in theatrical convention. In the experimental
theatre of the 1970s and 1980s, spectators almost routinely
found themselves sat upon, fondled, assaulted, hurled
about, handed lit joints of marijuana, and, in at least one
case (in Finland), urinated upon. These and other extreme
behaviors had become part of the license claimed by a
theatre purportedly trying to make itself heard above the
din of war, riots, and corruption. Or were its adherents, as