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

Theatre 257
many critics asked, merely “acting out” to get attention?
In any event, it was an era of violence and abandon that
brought the age of modernism to a crisis, if not to a conclusion:
the once-rebellious conventions of realism and antirealism
seemed tame compared to this newfound drive to
create shocking, immersive theatre events.
Well before the century’s end, however, this mood of
violent protest was largely spent, and the theatre turned
its focus from assaulting the audience to raising its social
awareness. Profanity and nudity no longer seemed novel
and, having lost their power to shock, became conventional
tools for addressing serious issues. The American
theatre, in particular, responded to the era’s pervasive
prejudices and privileges associated with gender, race,
class, and sexual orientation that were then were coming
under increasing fire as various movements—civil
rights, feminism, gay rights—gained a more prominent
cultural voice.
Internationally, the end of the twentieth century saw
an explosion of new social and political groups and the
rapid development of new technologies. A more global
economy challenged local cultures with enhanced but
often troubling prospects, while astonishing advances in
telecommunications—social networks, text-messaging,
smartphones—revolutionized the way the world’s populations
could connect. Technology continues to grow at a
shocking pace: the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2000,
a behemoth called Red, was matched five years later by
the Playstation 3, a compact video game console found in
thousands of households. Huge technological advances in
sound and lighting design, spurred by globally touring rock
concerts, created ear-splitting and eye-popping effects with
the press of a button. Productions that had previously been
seen only by the audiences seated in the theatres that were
presenting them were broadcast “live” into theatres elsewhere
in their countries, and soon after that broadcast into
theatres in various countries around the world.
And yet a mere year into the new millennium, whatever
political stability seemed to have been achieved
at the century’s end was staggered by a terrorist attack
on New York and Washington that was said to have
“changed everything” and that soon led, if indirectly, to
military invasions, suicide bombings, regime changes,
civil wars, insurrections, threats of nuclear proliferation,
a “global war on terror,” and worldwide economic crises.
This brings us to the present moment: on the one
hand, a time of increased communication, broadening
civil rights, and stunning technological innovation, but
on the other, of political instability and insecurity. The
theatre has responded quickly to these new freedoms and
opportunities. Once again, as in the days of Sophocles
and Shakespeare, the stage has surfaced as an arena in
which new thoughts, fashions, feelings, morals, opinions,
and styles can be enacted. New methods and philosophies
can be explored to help bring lucidity and structure to the
confusions that beset us all—or to reflect those confusions
back to us so we can confront the character of our
own time.
Although generalizations about an era still upon
us must be tentative, some major themes have clearly
emerged in today’s theatre, and we look at several of
them in the ensuing pages.
AN OPEN THEATRE
It is safe to say that, particularly in the United States,
theatre audiences and practitioners alike have opted
for an open theatre—open, that is, for an infinitely
wider range of interests, cultures, and individuals
than existed during any other period in theatre history.
The theatrical sense of “open” comes from Joseph
Chaikin’s short-lived but extremely influential Open
Theatre of the 1960s and 1970s. Openness makes us
painfully conscious of the theatre’s challenge to reflect
the humanity inside us and the society around us. For
although Shakespeare, for instance, was certainly able
to create magnificent female and multicultural characters
(Beatrice and Cleopatra, Othello and Shylock) and
his acting company was apparently skilled at bringing
them vividly to life, his theatre was still all-white and
all-male. This exclusivity had by the late twentieth
century proven unsustainable. How can such a group
of artists truly mirror the hopes and concerns of all
human nature: women, gays, transgendered men and
women, blacks, Native Americans, Asians, Latinos,
and on and on?
Today’s authors and directors have increasingly
sought to open the theatre to all. In gender, race, and ethnicity,
in playwrights, performers, producers, and directors,
the American theatre is now broadly diverse. And
the United States, known as a “melting pot” of races,
cultures, and religions from around the globe, is a leader
in creating such diversity in its theatre. But this was not
always the case.
Women were practically unrepresented in the theatre
until the seventeenth century (except in the commedia
dell’arte and some medieval English pageant productions),
and even afterward they were relegated mainly
to acting, copying scripts, and building costumes. Now
women comprise a major force at every level of the
American theatrical arts. Since the 1980s, eight women
playwrights (Paula Vogel, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman,