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

Theatre 15
This production of Bertolt Brecht’s sharply satirical Threepenny Opera, directed by Robert Wilson at the Berliner Ensemble
theatre (which Brecht founded in 1949), follows Brecht’s representational concepts, with its bold colors, super-white faced
actors facing front, and deliberately artificial lighting. The production played in New York City in 2011. © Lesley Leslie-Spinks
witnesses invariably perform—often drawing on a considerable
repertoire of body language—for the benefit of
the courtroom audience, the jury. Politicians kiss babies
for the benefit of parents (and others) in search of a kindly
candidate. Even stony silence can be a performance—if,
for example, it is in response to an overly eager admirer.
We are all performers. The theatre makes an art out of
performance: it expands something we all do every day
into a formal mode of artistic expression.
The theatre makes use of two general modes of performance:
presentational (or direct) and representational
(or indirect). Presentational performance is the basic
stand-up comedy or nightclub mode. Presentational performers
directly and continuously acknowledge the presence
of audience members by singing to them; dancing for
them; joking with them; and responding openly to their
applause, laughter, requests, and heckling. Dramatic forms
of all ages have employed these techniques and a variety of
other presentational methods, including asides to the audience,
soliloquies, direct address, and curtain calls.
Representational performance, however, is the more
fundamental mode of drama. In representational performance,
the audience watches behavior that seems to be
staged as if no audience were present. As a result, the
audience is encouraged to concentrate on the events that
are being staged, not on the nature of their presentation;
the audience believes in the play as if it were real.
This belief—or, to borrow Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s
famous phrase, this “willing suspension of disbelief ”—
attracts audience participation by encouraging a feeling
of kinship with the characters. We can identify with their
aspirations, sympathize with their plights, exult in their
victories, and care deeply about what happens to them.
When empathy is present, the audience experiences what
is often called the “magic” of theatre. Well-written and
well-staged dramas make people feel, not just think; they
draw in the spectators’ emotions, leaving them feeling
transported and even somewhat changed. This is as much
magic as our current world provides.
Occasionally, presentational and representational
styles are taken to extremes. In the late nineteenth century,
the representational movement known as realism
sought to have actors behave onstage exactly as real
people do in life, in settings made as lifelike as possible*
*Coleridge, S. T. (1817)., Biographical sketches of my literary
life and opinions.