Intro to Drama: Final (Modern Theatre 1915-1945)

WWI-first modern war; employed new artillery firepower and technology; 17 million total deaths, 20 million wounded, and many soldiers returning home with shell shock leading to feelings of disillusionment about the steady moral improvement and progress of human society Russian Revolution- establishes Soviet Union Depression Rise of Totalitarianism in Europe Rise of Nazi Germany and WWII

How could civilized rational societies create such destruction? How can genocide be explained? Are individuals responsible for societal actions? Theater mirrored the general social unrest Innovators rebelled against realism (too limited and simplistic) and commercial theater (which they saw as financially driven)

Modernist rejected moralizing and idealism of the realist; viewed the world as unstable and chaotic; focus more on internal, psychological states (influence of Freud)(projected onto stage); rejected realism's claim to objectivity as an illusion; focused more on the subjective (the individual's perception of events and the world); placed more demands on the reader/audience and sought to frustrate audience expectations about plot/character (no resolution/neat ending takes place, we have to construct meaning from multiple possible interpretations); claimed realism disguised the fact that language is incapable of revealing truth or reality; claimed you could only present, at best, one version of life (there are always competing narratives)

viewed the world as fundamentally ordered and stable; too concerned with external reality (individual in relation to society); claimed you could present life as it is in literature

Expressionism Surrealism Theatricalism/anti-illusionist theater

Reality is distorted to communicate inner feelings (exaggeration for emotional effect); often dreamlike; characters are often representative types (man, clerk, woman)

Believed unconscious was the highest plane of reality and attempted to recreate it dramatically; mixed recognizable events with fantastical happenings (influenced by Freud's work with dreams and the unconscious)

General movement away from realist acting, staging, playwriting; sought to expose the artificiality of the theater and believed in abolishing the barriers between actors and audience (action would often spill over from the stage)

most experimental Italian dramatist; used highly theatrical devices to expose the illusion of the theater; broke the bounds of traditional dramatic conventions to call attention to the work itself (metadrama); characters are often engaged in philosophical debates about the appearance of reality, the relativity of truth, and the role of fiction

Refused the notion that truth or meaning can be arrived at (there are as many truths as there are points of view); explores the value of low culture (melodrama) by incorporating it into high culture; reflects the impossibility of separating concepts like illusion/reality, fiction/life, and madness/sanity