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

Theatre 21
that we lack in the more disorderly stream of sensations in
life. It does this through conflict, generally between characters
but also within them, that shapes the action into
purposeful, meaningful human struggles. Taken together,
these struggles allow us to reflect on our own endeavors
and circumstances. A play presents cautionary tales or
characters that can serve as role models; it offers themes,
ideas, and revelations we can accept, scorn, or store for
future contemplation. Fundamentally, a play is a piece
of life that has been animated, shaped, and framed to
become a work of art. It provides a structured synthesis—
sometimes a critique and sometimes a celebration—of
life’s glories and confusions.
A play is also a piece of literature. In the West there
has been a reading audience for plays at least since the
time of the ancient Greeks, and play collections, such
as Shakespeare’s works, have been published since the
Renaissance. Today, plays are often printed in literary
anthologies, intermixed with poems, short stories, and
even novels. But drama should not be thought of as
merely a “branch” of literature; it is foremost a live performance,
of which some repeatable aspects (chiefly,
the words) may be captured in a written and published
text. We might say that drama is the “trunk” of the literary
tree, not merely a branch. In fact, much of what
we consider “old” forms of literature today, such as the
novel, are relative newcomers to world literature—the
first novel appeared at least two thousand years after
the first play!
Finally, as was said in a previous chapter, a play is
“playing,” and those who create plays are “players.” The
theatrical play contains root notions of “child’s play” in
its acting out and adventurism, of dressing up in its costumes
and props, and of the thrill of sportive competition
in all its energy and abandon. Like all play, drama
is an exhibition, and in a real sense its players are willingly
exhibitionistic. A play—even when it’s a tragedy—
should be exhilarating: to read, to see, to hear and, when
possible, to do.
Classifying Plays
Plays may be dynamic, but they are also contained. They
are framed with a beginning and end and, no matter how
original they may be, they can still be classified in a
variety of ways, most fundamentally by duration and by
genre. Although those categories were emphasized more
in the past than they are today, they still play a part in our
understanding of drama.
DURATION
How long is a play? American playwright Arthur Miller
admitted that when he first thought of writing for the
theatre, “How long should it be?” was his most pressing
question. The answer is far from obvious. And the fact
that Arthur Miller had to puzzle over a play’s duration
makes it clear it has implications beyond being merely a
technical consideration.
Historically, in Western drama, a “full-length” play
has usually lasted between two and three hours. This
is not an entirely arbitrary period of time; it represents
roughly the hours between lunch and dinner (for a matinee)
or between dinner and bedtime. The Jacobean
playwright John Webster wrote that the actor “entertains
us in the best leisure of our life, that is between meals,
the most unfit time either for study or bodily exercise.”
Webster was thinking of the afternoon performances in
the outdoor theatres of his day (c. 1615). A few years
earlier, speaking of indoor evening performances at
court, Shakespeare’s Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, asks for a play “to wear away this long age of
three hours between our after-supper and bed-time.”
Elsewhere, however, Shakespeare refers to “the twohours
traffic of our stage” (in and about Romeo and
Juliet), and in fact the average running time for the plays
appearing on Broadway in 2015 was two hours on the dot
for straight plays, and two hours 26 minutes for musicals.
Shakespeare’s sense of an audience’s patience was much
like our own.
But plays can be much shorter or longer. One-act
plays of an hour or less, or even popular “ten-minute
plays,” are occasionally combined to make a full theatre
program. Short plays, which have existed since ancient
times, can be presented in lunchtime theatres, dramatic
festivals, school assemblies, social gatherings, street
entertainments, cabaret performances, or other nontraditional
settings. The shortest play on record is probably
Samuel Beckett’s Breath, which can be performed
in one minute. There are exceptionally long plays as
well, particularly in many Asian countries, where, for
instance, traditional Chinese theatre can last all day and
Indian dance-dramas last all night. In recent decades,
seven- or eight-hour productions have proven popular
in the West, such as the recent Wolf Hall, a hit in England
that transferred to Broadway with its seven-hour
running time intact. In addition, audiences have flocked
to Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia in London and
New York, Peter Brook’s Mahabharata in Paris, Peter
Stein’s production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia in Berlin,