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

Masks were fundamental to ancient theatre and often appear in contemporary productions, particularly in revivals of
such classic works. Christina Uribe’s masks, sculpted in the ancient Greek tradition, were employed in this Greek/French
production of Sophocles’ Antigone directed by Philippe Brunet for his Demodocos company, which since 1995 has been
devoted to the pursuit of what Brunet calls “Dionysian mystery theatre.” The production, with costumes by Florence
Kukucka, was featured at the “off” schedule of France’s 2008 Avignon Theatre Festival; shown here are two chorus
members. © Laurencine Lot
to speak were “in character.” The mask provides both a
physical and a symbolic separation between the impersonator
(the actor) and the impersonated (the character),
thus aiding onlookers in temporarily suspending their
awareness of the “real” world and accepting in its place
the world of the stage. In a play, it must be the characters
who have apparent life; the actors themselves are
expected to disappear into the shadows, along with their
personal preoccupations, anxieties, and career ambitions.
This convention of the stage gives rise to what Denis
Diderot, an eighteenth-century French dramatist, called
the “paradox of the actor”: when the actor has perfected
his or her art, it is the simulated character, the mask, that
seems to live before our eyes, while the real person has
no apparent life at all. The strength of such an illusion
still echoes in our use of the word person, which derives
from the Latin word (persona) for mask.
But of course we know the actor does not die behind
the mask, and this knowledge hints at an even greater
paradox: we believe in the character, but at the end of the
play we applaud the actor. Not only that—as we watch
good theatre we are always, in the back of our minds,
applauding the actor. This is true in film as well: if Chris
Pratt makes you laugh as his character in Guardians of the
Galaxy, or if Shailene Woodley makes you cry while she
plays a terminally ill cancer patient in The Fault in Our
Stars, you are emotionally reacting to the fiction while,
in the back of your head, thinking “what a great actor!”
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