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

Theatre 25
Kevin Spacey plays the “hunch-backed” King Richard III in Shakespeare’s
history play of that name. At London’s Old Vic Theatre, 2011; directed by
Sam Mendes, with costumes by Catherine Zuber. © Geraint Lewis
continuous hilarity through common devices like fullstage
chases, mistaken identities, lovers hiding in closets
or under tables, sexual puns, switched potions, clever disguises
(often involving cross-dressing), misheard instructions,
and sheer physical buffoonery; such works are
usually labeled farce. Comedies have been immensely
popular in all ages, but because they are about ordinary
life rather than larger-than-life heroes, they usually lose
their popularity sooner. And because they rarely probe as
deeply into human destiny as do tragedies, they offer less
fertile ground for academic scholarship and hence are less
frequently published in anthologies, examined in scholarly
literature, or placed on college course syllabi. Nevertheless,
some comedies (particularly those of Shakespeare
and Molière) are considered true masterpieces of human
observation, and comedy’s place in the theatre world is
every bit as secure as tragedy’s—and as popular as it was
in the days of Aristophanes, the great comic playwright of
ancient Greece.
Other genres are defined from time to time, and playwrights
often have fun creating genres of their own, but
none have any truly definitive value. The history play,
mentioned briefly above, did not die with Shakespeare.
It has come into the modern era as the occasional play
about a historical figure; examples include George Bernard
Shaw’s Saint Joan, Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo, and
Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III. More common
today is the documentary drama, which is a play
that makes use of actual documents—court records, for
example, or transcribed interviews. A recent work of
documentary drama is Moisés Kaufman’s The Laramie
Project, about the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay
student at the University of Wyoming. The play used
interviews with members of the community as its
script—and, on its ten year anniversary, returned to
gather new material for a companion piece, The Laramie
Project: Ten Years Later.
Many genres exist in between the major categories.
Tragicomedy, as the name implies, attempts to blend tragedy
and comedy. Maintaining a serious theme but varying
the approach from serious to humorous, while leaving
the hero alive at the end, tragicomedy relaxes tragedy’s
larger-than-life scale and is sometimes known as “tragedy
that ends happily.” Melodrama, whose heyday was
the nineteenth century, is outwardly serious, embellished
with spectacular staging and flamboyant dialogue, along
with highly suspenseful, contrived plotting. Presenting a
simple and finite confrontation between good and evil,
rather than a complex exposition of universal human
aspirations and sufferings, melodramas cannot sustain
unpleasant endings or generate catharsis. When performed
today, they are almost always staged as parodies
of their originals and are played for laughs. The musical,
of course, is a major genre—the most commercially successful
genre in the American theatre today—and is the
subject of another chapter in this book.
Certainly, no system of classification should obscure
the fact that every play is unique; the grouping of any
two or more plays into a common genre is only a convenience
for purposes of comparison and analysis. But
applying genres can help us comprehend the broad spectrum
of purposes to which plays may be put, and help
us to perceive important similarities and differences
between individual works. For the theatre artist, awareness
of the possibilities inherent in each genre—together
with knowledge of the achievements made in each—
stimulates the imagination and aids in setting work standards
and ambitions.