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Contemporary Drama, : - Coggle Diagram

- - - - The search for God, Truth or a witness is above all a desperate cry for light in the. form of love, understanding, and communication.
- - - - By the late 1950s and 1960s, a more anti-realistic theatre emerged in the United States to take on the job of questioning the conventional ideologies of realism in order to reveal the gaps in such limited constructions of identity and Truth. Anti-realism is concerned with eschewing the reproduction of surface reality, distorting these surfaces through stage settings that are not faithfully specific of a certain time or place, and presenting characters who play with the boundaries between actor/character/real person, the blurred line between ‘acting’ and ‘being".
        
        For Aristotle, the theatre achieved its function through catharsis, typically defined as a ‘purging’ of negative emotions, thereby purifying and strengthening the spectator. Audience members arrive at catharsis through their reaction to the play, experiencing both terror (sometimes translated as ‘fear’) and pity in connection with the action and their identification with the protagonist.
        
        Along with Boal, European theatre practitioners in the twentieth century, such as Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, would offer political, ideological and structural challenges to Aristotle, opening the doors for a dynamic theatre that would ask audiences to engage with difficult existential, epistemological and ontological questions – issues regarding the nature of experiencing, knowing and being in the world – to inspire thoughtful considerations of who we are and how we fit into our various communities.
  - - - By the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, postmodern drama in America had extended representation to socio-political groups that had formerly been denied a voice, primarily on the basis of social class, race, gender or sexual orientation. Postmodern performance has expanded the representation of identit(ies) to those who have been marginalised in society, and focuses on the subjectivity and multiplicity of truth and experience.
        
        At the end of the 1940s and throughout the 1950s, playwrights in Europe, influenced greatly by the theories of Bertolt Brecht in Germany and Antonin Artaud in France, were developing a new kind of drama that deliberately questioned the nature of truth and reality primarily through exploring the notion that language interprets and constructs – rather than simply represents – reality.
        
        By the 1960s and 1970s, the off- and off-off-Broadway theatre scene was increasingly becoming the venue of choice for dramatic experimentation, offering an alternative to the economic pressures of expensive Broadway productions.
        
        The historical, social and aesthetic development of experimental theatre that grew out of a post- Second World War world view and gained prominence at the end of the 1950s and into the 1960s in Europe, Britain and the United States. Instability, uncertainty and contradiction dominated these dramatic forms, as the unreliability of memory/history and the struggles of human connection and communication became dominant themes to be explored.
        
        African-American theatre has relied on both realistic and antirealistic dramatic modes to express complex cultural and personal experiences. The late twentieth century still provided only limited mainstream opportunities for African-American playwrights. The growing popularity of hip hop/rap in American culture during the 1980s and 1990s increasingly influenced contemporary American dramatists, who incorporated hip hop style and rap dialogue into their plays. As hip hop was becoming the dominant style of African-American cultural expression, its highly dramatic character allowed black artists to move beyond the boundaries of traditional theatre and use hip hop performance to comment on the complexities of racial identity and the hypocrisies of the American capitalist system.
        
        During the 1960s and 1970s, the American theatre was becoming increasingly political, and performance groups developed mainly in New York City to challenge the primacy of the written text in the theatre and serve as a protest to realism’s strict boundaries between audience and performer, actor and character. These theatre groups were revolutionary in both form and content, often serving as venues for political dissent during turbulent times, and focusing on breaking realism’s ‘fourth wall’ – the invisible wall that separates the stage action from the audience – in order to encourage live encounters between spectator and performer.
        
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  - - - Brecht’s primary contribution to twentieth-century theatre began with his rebellion against the forms of drama that dominated the European, British and American theatre during the early and mid-nineteenth century: the melodrama and the well-made play.
        
        Language is presented as the common, everyday speech of its audience, and characters aim to represent complex human beings with a consistent and stable personality and psychology. Actor and character are seen as one and the same, and truth is usually presented as something fixed and knowable, something that can be directly and clearly expressed in language. Artificiality is rejected in favour of representing people fully as they ‘really are’ without censorship: the good, the bad, the grotesque, the beautiful, the boring and the exciting.
        
        Politically, realism in the theatre seeks to investigate social and material conditions, mores and values. dramatic realism seeks to naturalise the relationship between stage representation and the outside world, suggesting that the representation is the real.
  - - - Brecht’s Epic Theatre aimed to reveal the human condition as determined by social and political forces such as poverty and material necessity, and thereby capable of change. Epic Theatre is highly didactic, aiming to teach, instruct and inspire thought.
        
        Brecht’s plays were made up of episodic scenes that were connected but not seamless, as they were interrupted by placards, cards or projections that announced a title for each scene (or episode), serving to highlight and explain the main point or focus of that scene.
        
        Characters in Brecht’s plays often address the audience and frequently break out into song so as to interrupt the narrative action and, once again, remind the audience that they are watching a performance that requires intellectual engagement.
  - - - Honouring, capturing and presenting these impulses in their purest possible forms through ritualistic spectacle are key to the theater of cruelty. Representations and, therefore, mimetic repetition have no place in the theater of cruelty, as the theatre exists to create something new and explore a terror beyond rational expression.
        Along with Brecht’s anti-mimetic, politically charged emphasis on social transformation through the motivations of intellect, laid the foundation for a rejection of realism and the emergence of the anti-realistic dramatic styles that would characterise European experimental theatre after the Second World War and well into the 1950s and 1960s.
    - - The philosophy behind Genet’s plays was part of a revolution in the theatre that was taking place in Europe and Britain, primarily in response to the social and political changes brought about by the Second World War. In 1961, Martin Esslin’s landmark study, The Theatre of the Absurd, described what he saw as a new movement in
        European and British drama that had emerged during the 1940s and 1950s, one that reflected the representative attitude after the Second World War ‘that the certitudes and unshakable basic assumptions of former ages have been swept away, that they have been tested and found wanting, that they have been discredited as cheap and somewhat childish illusions’
        
        Stylistically, their plays challenged traditional dramaturgy in their rejection of the realistic conventions of narrative plot, the developed characterisations that explore motive, a well-defined structure, an accurate reflection of social reality, and a language that rationally expresses meaning. Instead, these plays had ‘no story or plot to speak of ’, were ‘often without recognizable characters and present the audience with almost mechanical puppets’, had ‘neither a beginning nor an end’, were frequently ‘reflections of dreams and nightmares’, and presented language that could be described as ‘incoherent babblings’.
      - Anti-realistic contemporary drama accepts that we cannot express Truth through language, a system of difference; we can only approximate it.
        
        Language is almost useless as far as the expression of Truth is concerned, but the silence is worse, an unbearable void.
        
        Beckett, Pinter and Albee deconstruct the contradictions and inconsistencies inherent in our constructed realities by prioritising linguistic play over direct communication and exploring how the mind reinvents the past and translates experience into meaning, a focus which would become a marked feature of the contemporary American postmodern theatre.
        
        Although the playwrights of the Absurdist tradition are often read as promoting the notion that communication is impossible and futile, their work points to greater subtlety regarding the nature of communicating the artist’s vision in the theatre. For these writers, it is the artist’s subjective vision – a multiplicity of truth(s) – rather than one supposedly objective Truth that can and should be communicated.