# Theatre 120 notes

## Author introduction
Susan Glaspell: (1876 - 1948) Midwest person
* BornDavenport， Iowa（Midwest Person）
* Jounralist/Writer
* Moved to Grenwich Village
* Once in NYC, started writing plays while continue writing fictions. Start because she started reading interesting writeplays
* Won Pulitzer Prize for Drama (a national level outstanding prize).
* Devotes in promoting theatre across the country

### Provincetown Players
* First productions (1915) at summer cottage in Provincetown Massachusetts
* **Little theatre movement**. Art form engaged with social issues. Do shows in small theatre with small audience. -> an explosion in how people think of drama

### Trifles as a Realist Play
* Invisible Walls
* Performance as realistic as possible
* Learn about the characters' psychology and society through setting and dialogue
* Often dealt with difficult or ***scandalous*** subjects

### What does setting imply about the Wrights
Ordinary things tell us about the background
1. Cold
2. Silence
3. Broken Jars
4. Disorder in Kitchen

### What environmental or societal factors shape the characters in the play?
* Gender
* Job title or Work (Experience/Skills/Knowledge)
* Marital Status

### Trifles as a Detective Story
* Populary literary genre since 1840s
* Detective uses empirical data and reasoning to solve case
* Super-empiricist Sherlock Holmes made famous on stage by actor William Gillette from 1890s - 1932

#### Traditional Detective Drama: Linear and Climatic
1. **Exposition** : We learn the circumstances of the case
2. **Rising Actions**: Evidence is discovered, conflicts between characters, red herring (与事实不相干的论点) may arise.
3. **Climax**: Through empirical observationa dn deduction, detective reveals truth, crime solved
4. **Falling Action & Resolution**: punishment, criminal rational

#### Assumptions
* Logic Reveals Truth
* Behavior is resolved as good/bad according to legal/societal definitions
* Social standards are upheld through punishment and justice
* Audience identifies with "good guys".

#### Divergence
Two parallel plot-lines
* Men keep along with the traditional truth-discovery process
* Women tamper with evidence
Climax: Women hide the birds

### Trfiles as feminist drama
* Barely passes the Bechdel Test (two women with names talk about something besides men to each other)
* Makes transparent gender bias
* Asks audience to identify with female characters

## Glaspell's iterations of the Trifles Story
* SG writes of actua murder case of Hohn Hassock as a Journalist in 1900
* SG writes Trifles based lossely on murder case in 1916
* SG writes short story, "A Jury of Her Peers" in 1917

# Staging in Classical Athens
## Athens in the 5th Cent. BCE
* A political, economic center
* A htbed of cultural and intellectual activity
* A major naval power
## Who were the athenians?
* 30,000 were citizens. Other 90% are slaves, women, children, foreigners
* Excellent thinkers and talkers
* Love the idea of **agon** (compoetition, contest, debate)
## Dionysia (Growth/Productivity/Sexuality/Children)
Theme: Logic V.S uncontrolled elements in life
Wonderful, productive V.S violence
* Party God/God of wine
## Who acted in the Plays
* Men wearing masks and robes. No women actors, men player male and female roles (Costume to make actors look big)
* 2-3 Actors
* A chorus of 12-15 persons Lead Chorous (member was the Choragos)
* Musicians
* Performance are both religious and civilic
## Location of the Production: Theatre of Dionysus
Built into the side of Pantheon
* Theatron: "see place"
* Skene: building or platform (Back stage)
* Orchestra: "dancing place"
* Parados: entrace/exit for Chorus, Messengers, actors who need to appear to be coming to/from somewhere else
## Restrictions/Challenges
* No Female actors
* Performed in daylight, no cutrain or lights to hide scene changes
* Mostly mythic stories everyone knew (Re-telling/reshaping classic stories)
* Only 3 actors max!
* Protagonist
* Antagonist
## Three Kinds of Plays
> Aristotle: *Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude*

* Comedy - humorous plays, often satirical, tended to imagine happy outcomes
* *Satyr - bawdy plays that touched upon the tragic themes of the plays shown earlier in the day*
* Tragedy - plays that address the human experience in ways that evoke pity and fear in the audience

### Six elements:
* These elements belong to the objects/persons imitated
* Plot
> *The soul of tragedy*
> *Actions more important than characters*
* Characters
* Thoughts
* Diction
* Song
* Spectacle (Shows the manner of imitation)
> Reversal of the Situation is a change by which the action veers round to its opposite, subject always to our rule of probability or necessity.

> Recognition, as the name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune.

> Suffering: A third part is the Scene of Suffering. The Scene of Suffering is a destructive or painful action, such as death on the stage, bodily agony, wounds, and the like

## Audience response to climax of play (catastrophe)
* At the moment when recognition, reversal and suffering combine (climax or catastrpohe), the audience feels pity and fear for the hero, and undergoes a purging of emotions, or **catharsis**

## What makes a good hero
> The hero, ideally is "not eminently good and just yet whose misfortune is brought about not by vice or depravity, but by some error frailty (hamartia)"

## Key words
* Error/Frailty (Hamartia)
* Recognition and Reversal
* Anagnorosis and Peripeia
* Climax (Catastrophe)
*** Pity and Fear**

# The Other - a journey of slavery
## Why Africans?
* Indians cannot be enslaved - disease, known the infrastructure,too smart, proud
* White slaves can disappear in the population (white package)

## invention of cotton gin - Plantation Slavery:
* Before slavers are just servants
* Mainly Southern American
* Try to mechanizing human lives -> where brutality comes in
* Called the "new man". Trying to reinventing men (First invention of the europe)

> *Slavery is an economic endeavor*

## Tradings are terminated
* Black women become breeder

## Abolitionist - John Browns
* Recruit black and white abolitionists to storm the South (catalyst of civil war)
* After civil war ends, the entire America enters this new era filled with hope - Era of reconstruction
* Southern states have blacks in state legislations

## Guiding bullets
* ***Awareness***
* ***Truth***
* ***Witness***
* ***Empathy***

## The Escape
comedy about race, slavery, miscegenation
Melo-drama: Hightened super-realistic play

## Attention:
1. If you talk in calss, remember to sign up
2. Free Evil Dead: The Musical tickets
3. New symphony hall open rehearsals
* Thurs 3:15 - 5:00
* Fri. 9:15 - 10:15
* 15 minutes earliers
* no breaks entire time.

# Medea Myth: A brief overview
## Medea: "Not the girl next door"
* Granddaughter of Helios, the Sun God(older god than Apollo)
* Niece of Circe and Pasiphae, immortal sorceresses
* Daughter of Aetes, King of Colchis (son of Helios) (Far side of the world)
* Aphordite (goddess of love) has her son Eros (god of desire) make her fall in love with Jason

## Background story:
Colchis is very far away from Greeks

How Claytonand Hunt describe Medea's situation in Corinth
* A woman in a man's world
* An Asian in a Greek world
* A sorceress in a rational world

Structure of tragedy:
### Key terms
* Episodes = scenes between actors
* Odes = choral songs
* Parados = choral entrance
* Exodos = choral exit
* Agon = debate
* Creon and Medea (1 debate)
* Jason and Medea (2 debates)
* Chorus and Medea (several)
In each of the debate, Medea is fighting for her life

### Plots
* Slow beginning (exposition)
* Fast ending (murders)
* Progressive meetings with men, progressive rhetorical strategies

* Creon -> Logic: Supplication parental love
* Jason Legal rights -> Logic
* Aegeus -> Trade

## Medea as Villain
Outsider to Athenian morality
* Faithless to father/brother/chidlren
* Breaks taboo 0 infanticide
* Lies
* Immoderate
* Foreigner
* Tricky sorceress
* Use of poison (woman's weapon) and cloth(woman's tool)
Evidence: Chorus' s reaction in Ode III and thereafter

## What's a Greek Hero
* Traits of a Greek epic hero
* Time: Honor/wealth
* Arete: excellence/power/beauty
* Kleos: glory
* Descended from a god
* NOT: self-sacrifice, humility, team spirit
* What are the qualities expected in a female reflected in the Chorus' odes? (Sophrosyne-moderation, balance, self-control)

# Medea sa Hero
* Prominence of Medea
* Allegiance with Aegeus, representative of Athens
* Destroys Corinth
* Victory over her enemies
* Physical elevation - mechane

# Dramatic Texts in Performance
* Performance itself is a kind of text. A set of choices made by actors, designers, directors and audience to interprest the dramatic text in a particular way.
* Scholars often read performances as another kind of "text:" an interpretation of an original play script, a translation of an original play scrip,t a translation or adapatation of ana originial play, or a performance created out of a set of rules, such as work of improvisation

## Masks
* Recent masks are less realistic than the ancient Greek masks. The absence of realism has made the masks more exprssive
* Chorus may not use the masks.
* Sense of mystery of the mask
* Modern -> Character ; Ancient -> Chorus

## Traditional Setting
* The skene served as the permanent backdrop of plays performed at Theatre Dionysos. Painted backdrops sometimes hung from skene, but major features not changeable

## Research Paper
* Define the scenery (What is scenery? and other terminologies)
* Describe the characteristics of the scenry
* Not expected to write everything of scenery / write strategically
* Good -> makes me laugh; Bad does not work
* Concentrate on scenry that talks to the audience (Winter? Laugh)
* Write about opinions over the facts and analysis
* Final paragraph is a conclusion
* 700 - 750 words

# Theatre in Medieval Japan: Noh Drama - The Art of Walking

## Life in Medieval Japan (1181 - 1600)
* Feudal Societal Structure
* Warrior Leaders (Samurai) with Shogun at the head
* Loyalty and Honor in Service
* Lots of Wars
* Strict Societal Boundaries/Castes
* Interest in Religion and the Arts
* Zen Buddhism
* Shintoism (Family Ancestor)
* Nature (Find spiritual meaning/gpd in nature)
* Impermanence (自其变者而观之，则天地曾不能以一瞬 )
* Created at 1400

## Noh Drama and Performance
* Borrowed plots, themes, even lines from other works of literature
* Reference to other great literatural works
* Reflection over Reaction
* Highly stylized performance for
* Troupes made of families (Actors' ancestor might be anctors for many generations)
* Family Business
* A way to link the actor themselves to the impermanence of genrations ago
* Highly controlled style
* "The Art of Walking"

## Zeami Motokiyo
* Son of actor Kanami, who was also an actor and playwright
* Castes are below Samurai
* Patron was Samurai Ashikaga Yoshimitsu
* Took over leadership of family troupe after father's death
* Wrote about 50 plays and major works on theory of Noh

### Comments on what theatre should do
Key elements:
* HANA: True communication between actor and audience through actor capturing the essence in performance.
* When the audience is caught up in the actor's performance we say that there is flower (hana). Thus, the flower is everything for the actor, because if he has failed to create it the audience will sooner or later desert him
* Yugen: Yugen is the beauty of seeing ... an ideal person go through an intense suffering as a result of being human.
* Happiness / Tragedy
* Monomane: Imitation must be appropriate to get to the "real" elements of the character portrayed
### Comments from a real Noh Play Video
* Very slow action (Encourage reflection on small things)
* Amaze us with minimum amount of movement
* Deep due to deeply concentrated, heavy themes
* Masks: extremely dramatic tools for expression

# Atsumori - Repetition/Memory/Time/Reality

## The source story
from The Tale of Heike and other sources
About twelfth-century war between the Taira and Minamoto clans in Japan
* Kumage is a mature warrior who challenges the fleeing Atsumori to turn around and fight him
* Humagae wins, but then realizes Atsumori is a youth, ,around the age of Kumagae's son
* Seeing his own troops arriving, Kumagae beheads Atsumori to make his suffering quick
* Later, Kumagae takes religious vows to pray for Atsumori's soul

## Actors/Characters
* SHITE
* Act I Grass Cutter
* Act LL Atsumori
* Mask tied to super-natural
* WAKI
* Kumagae/Rensho
* Kyogen
* Person who lives at Summa Bay

Musicians/Managers are all present on stage

## Repetition
### The Story of the battle
* Act ONE, story inferred
* Interlude, kyogen tells story
* Act TWO, story relived by Kumagae and Atsumori

### The call for prayers
* Act One: Grasscutter asks Priest to pray for him
* Kyogen: Promise to pray for Atsumori's soul
* Atsumori: Ghost of Atsumori specifically asks for prayers

### Music/The flute
* Act One: Grasscutter plays flute, Priest amazed at the music (Green Leaf)
* Interlude: Kyogen recounts the story of Atsumori's flute (Little Branch)
* Act Two: flute is played by musicians as the story of Atsumori's going back for his flute is retold

## Symbolism
Pods: stop actors from falling apart (they are wearing mask)
Always three pine trees: symbol of nature, life, time

# Shakespeare's Theatre: Performance Conventions in Early Modern England
## Elizabethan Politics
* Dominant Naval Power
* Imperial Conquest
* Religious unrest (Catholic vs. Anglican) kept under strict check
* No longer popes in charge of church but kings
* Bloody Marry tries to turn the whole country back to Catholic again
* Censorship
* After, Elizabeth takes in charge. (Extreme amount of political censorship to prevent violence possibly caused by religious unrest)
* Public theatre carefully monitored
* Never mention of God (Only Greek/Roman God) -> Super-natural play but not many discussion of religion
## Early Modern Theatres in England
* Major outdoor public theatres 1580s - 1640s
* Outdoor because do not need candles (which are very expensive at that time)
* In 1642, due to a civil war, all theatres are closed
* Commercial - actors made money as shareholders
* Patronage of upper-class-citizens
* England at that time has a very strict cast system

## Giving the People What They Want
* Public, across-the-border theatres - Bankside, south of Thames River
* Just out the city line (do not need to worry about regulation)
* Entertainment complex built around the theater
* Extremely cheap and popular (Democratic)

## Stage design used most in U.S. today: The Proscenium (Picture Frame) Arch Stage
* Cramming as many people as possible

## Thrust Stages: Shakespearean Public Theaters:
* Stage would go out to the audience seats.
* Very limited scenery
* Save money
* Does not block audience's vision
* Audience is closed to the stage
* Trap doors (Cool special effects)
* Balcony behind the stage (Musicians) => Bring height to the stage
* Special effects: Roll canal-balls -> Sound like storm
* Violence (More swords play, the better)

## Cheapest Tickets went to "Groundlings"
* Standing room only for 1000 people
* Groundling actually surrounded the thrust stage, stood for 3-4 hours (Like today's rock concert)
*
## The Swan Theatre from 1596
* First half of Shakespear's career
* Open air amphitheatre
* 3 tiers of seating (levels)
## Also private theatres for elites
* Small and indoor (artificial light)
* Command performances for the Aristocracy
* Used as entertainment and displays of wealth
## Acting Conventions
* No women onstage - boy actors played young female roles
* Lush costuming reflecting status, identity (Social Law: people has to wear cloth that fit their class)
* People go for both sword fight and fancy clothes
* Select props(小道具)
* Challenge for actors
* Multiple plays in repertory (round-robin)
* New plays every few weeks (Much like live show)
## William Shakespeare - Man of the Theater
* Playwright, actor, shareholder (part-owner of company)
* Wrote 1-2 plays per year
* Often wrote plays collaboratively (Macbeth might get its inspiration from other playwrights)
* Start with Lord Chamberlain's Men (1597)
* Become King's Men (1603)
* Lord Chamberlain's Men became King (reasons why Shakespeare's play is important to be sponsored)
## Writing style
* Borrowed Plots
* Five-act structure
* Short scenes
* Subplots (Aristotle said subplots weren't good)
* [Lambic Pantameter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iambic_pentameter)
* Blank verse (Help people remember)
* As closed to spoken English as possible
* unstressed/stressed pairs (Lines are fit into a certain beat patterns)
## Lambic Pentameter: Examples
Verse that sounds like English prose, does not usually rhyme, fiver stressed syllables perline
If _*mu*_sic *be* the _good_ of _love_, play _on_
But _soft_ what _light_ from _yon_der _win_dow breaks

## Other things to listen for:
* Use of rhyming couplets
* Breaks in the verse
* Use of prose instead of verse
* Asides (Speaking directly to audience but not to the characters)

## Macbeth and trochaic tetrameter (Used in elder time)
* Most characters in the play speak in iambic pentameter (blank verse).
* The witches speak in trochaic tetrameter (four stresses to a line).

This is much older English verse form than blank verse.
* Witches are speaking in the old way
* They are part of the old rules

# Macbeth
## Source story
HOLINSHEAD's chronicles (1577)
* Major work describing history of England, Ireland, Scotland
* Shakespeare used this text as a resource for over 1/3 of his plays
* Freely adapted the "facts" from his source

## Political landscape of London 1603
* Elizabeth I dies in 1603 after 44 years in power.
* Having no heir, the Tudor period ends, and the Stuard period begins with James Stuard crowned James I of England
* James Stuard is already James VI of Scotland
* England and Scotland have separate governments but the same King
* James I of England/James VI of Scotland becomes patron of Shakespeare's theatre troupe

Side note: James VI/James I believed in witches, wrote a book about witches in 1597, and supported their punishment by execution when discovered.

## What makes Macbeth tragic
* Character in high position makes an error that leads to both personal annihilation and disaster to their community
* We witness character's suffering
* Beyond Aristotle:
* Several tragic plot-liens to follow
* Comic scenes (Entertain the audience, serve as a counter-play)
* Violence onstage
* Different concept of fates (The wheel of fortune)

## WHO IS MACBETH
He is **violent** and **ambitious**

Ambition:
* Strive for an ideal
* Strive to prove I can have it

## Witches, Equivocation & Selective Attention
* Instead of Prologue, play begins with witches' convocation
* Nature also present on stage (sounds of lightening rain, thunder-storm)
* "Fair is foul; and foul is fair" (abstruse riddle) (Equivocation)
* Equivocation: "The use of ambiguous language to conceal the truth, or to avoid committing oneself"

## Lady Macbeth: Selective Attention Redux

## Nature becomes un-natural and civil order goes away after the death of king
Armor symbolizes MacDuff

## Sleeplessness
Loss of appetite and possible hallucinations
Lady Macbeth: Somnambulism and Obsessive Compulsions
(Ironic, Lady Macbeth says to Macbeth that he needs more sleep)
5.1.36-42 Just a verse, not a poem -> How disorder she is
5.1.75 - 9, 82-3: Similar to Medea, people around comments on the behavior of main characters

First page: 300 words about thesis and ideas about thesis and how we proceed to conduct the research
Second page : six sub-questions (supporting/different questions) one sentence explaining why it is significant

# King's Horseman
## Ritual V.S Theater
* Ritual is meant to transform
* Theater meant to entertain
## What makes a drama post-colonial
* Acts that interrogate the hegemony that underlies the imperial representation
* Acts performed with the awareness of, and something the incorporation of, post-contact forms
* Acts performed for the continuation and/pr regeneration of the colonised communities
* Acts that respond to the experience of Imperialism, whether directly or indirectly
## Hegemony
Definition: the position of being the strongest and most powerful and therefore able to control others.
## To Greek Play
### Similar to Greek Tragedy
* Events in play take place in short period of time
* Characters' actions affect not just self but community
* Characters not perfect but not evil
* Good intention, but due too much power/ignorance, leads to tragedy
### Difference
* Community more important than self
* Circular rather than linear notion of time (A sense of continuity of things happen before and things happen after)
* Yoruba culture, gods and people have a more interconnected relationship

## Circulation of time
* Yoruba religion senses continuity between the dead and the living worlds and the people inhabiting both places
* Elesin's destiny since birth has been ordained

## Elisin's Mis-step (Hamartia)
* Elesin's desire for physical pleasure makes him forget the need for suffering
* Marriage as a hamartia
* Draws him to world he is supposed to be leaving
* Takes from community, values his desires over common good
* "Eater of leftovers"

## Olunde's Sacrifice
* Become his father's father

## Pilkings
* Spectator but not participant
* Refuses to change
* "You believe that everything which appears to make sense was learned from you"

## Metatheatricality in Death and the King's Horseman
* One culture is performing another culture
* "Tawdry decadence": pretentious
* British music played badly
* Prince in 17th Century European costume

Against Communism -> Good (Black White morality)
Against labor union (Hofa)
Bobby found his meaning of life during campaign against the union

Invasion to Cuba failed
President turn to general attorney for foreign policy

# The Gas Heart
## Author
* Tristan Tzara, Born ROmania,
* Leader of the Data art movement in Zurich, 1910s
* Moved to Paris, 1920
## DADA and World War I
* War of Attrition (Two sides that are very equally match. No side gets any truly triumphant battle)
* Technological Developments increased devastation (Great deal of suffering )
* 65 million soldiers mobilized, 8.5 million killed
* Cities demolished
NOTE: DADA sees itself as art reflecting the absurdity of WWI
Opening night at **Cabaret Voltaire**: go to Cabaret, people order drinks and shows are given.
* Three poets read simultaneously, inflections and rhythms competing with the others to create purely artistic babble.
* Suddenly, language no longer means what they meant
## Antagonistic to its Audiences
* Trying to make audience uncomfortable
* Hugo Ball's and Kurt Schwitter's sound poems
## Comparison
### Gas Heart
* Characters are symbolic, unrealistic,
* Events and moments of conflict arbitrary
* Non-realistic set
* Audience expected to laugh, boo, etc.
### Trifles
* Individual characters have defined personality
* Plot is linear with a clear conflict
* Realistic set includes props with clues about characters
* Audience expected to listen attentively
## Gas heart as commentary on assumptions about Drama in performance
* Strange spatial relationships
* strange character relationships
* "Impossible" Stage Directions
* Sound and Rhythm of dialogue more important than meaning of words

Parody:
* [Clytemnestra] (https://www.greekmythology.com/Myths/Mortals/Clytemnestra/clytemnestra.html#targetText=In%20Greek%20mythology%2C%20Clytemnestra%20was,Castor%2C%20Polydeuces%2C%20and%20Helen.) Reference (queen who kill her husband) (She is a horse)
* It's lagging ... (Mess up stage direction)
* This will end in a happy marriage

## Notes about Kenedy family
* Hoover blackmails the president for sexual scandal
* Linden Johnson and Bobby battle for the following presidency ??
* L.B.J takes ownership on his brother's legacy
* Grieve humanize him. Learn from ancient Greek tragedy -> Deep identification with people who suffer## Notes about Kenedy family
* Hoover blackmails the president for sexual scandal
* Linden Johnson and Bobby battle for the following presidency
* L.B.J takes ownership on his brother's legacy
* Grieve humanize him. Learn from ancient Greek tragedy -> Deep identification with people who suffer
* Struggling in define himself and what he stood for. (Fall behind in the poll) -> only see himself fullfiliing the legacy his brother has left behind
* L.B.J team up with Bobby
* Bobby went climbing mountain ...
* Profoundly destructive if just give money away: need investment
* Start to question moral legitimacy of the War
* Hurt got from the assasination from his brother prepare him for the sympathy to the other who left behind
* More turn away from Johnson due to the failure in Vietname war -> Turn to Eugene McCarthy
* People go crazy when Bobby decide that he was going to run for presidency
* Giving speech to black community right after Martin Luther king is murdered
* "comes wisdom through the awful grace of god" is the poem he quoted during the speech
* Eugene McCarthy is scornful towards the entry of president campaign of Bobby
* Oregon - > First lost
* California -> Treat him like a rock star
* Embraced by people of color (These are my people!) not since Abraham Lincolin
* China town (no body guard/security protection) (Fire crackers sounds like gun shot)
* For the first time, shaken off from the shine of his brother

# Raisin in the Sun and American Theatre History
## Before Class
* Language and culture are living and breathing entities which change over not only cneturies but decades (Words used in the play are now considered offensive)
* Use out of date terms when quoting the play verbatim in your papers, or sometimes when reading the text out loud. If you don't have to read a quote out loud with an offensive term, don't
## Historical Context
* First play by an African-American woman performed on Broadway
* Considered a masterwork of American realism, and a pivotal African-American drama

## Quote by James Baldwin
"Never before,in the entire history of American theatre, had so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on stage." (The truth of the African American culture has not appeared in mainstream media before - not just African American bodies)

## Author: Lorraine Hansberry
* Born Chicago, 1930
* Parents economically successful despite systematic racial bias in the city, frieds of African-American thinkers and leaders
* Father, Carl Augustus Hansberry, a businessman in real-estate and civil rights advocate (Opportunity to approach very famous, profound people) [Hansberry v.s Lee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hansberry_v._Lee): move African American into a white community
* Listen to other thinkers and ideas even when she was just a child
*
## Move in to Woodlawn neighborhood:
* They need to fight to live in the community.
* Mom used a gun to protect the house
* Dad work with lawyers to fight for their proper rights
## Segregation in Chicago
* The Great Migration and the Black Corridor: Black people move from the south to find meaningful work in the mid-west areas.
* Black Corridor: Where black people gather.
* Redlining and "Neighborhood Covenants" by nearby white residents (very un-welcomed)
* Only allowing a group of people in a small area in the entire city -> Land owners can charge what ever they want regardless of the living conditions of the community

## Education in UW-Madison
* Attended UW-Madison 2 years, majoring in arts
* First colored student live on campus housing (Langdon Manner? a women's arts dorm)
* Voted whether she could live in the dorm in the welcome party
* Student activist and leader: President, WIsconsin branch of Young Progressives of America her sophomore year

## Early influence from Sean O'Casey's
* Dublin: Lots of similar situations between the Black and the Irish - same segregation
* Wish to translate the universality, commonality to her own experience as an African America

## A writer's life
* Met and mentored by great artists like Alice Childress, actor Paul Robeson, civil rights leader, W.E.B Dubois
* Wrote for the Forward newspaper, published by Robeson, edited by Louis Burnham.

## Broadway opening 1959
* Directed by a very young actor Lloyd Richards
* Sidney Poitier as Walter Lee
* Ruby Dee as Ruth
* Claudia McNeill as Lena
* They saw **quality, power** in the play!!!!!
* Won Dramatic Critics Circle Award for best play, nominated for Tony Award

## Environment as Actor and Insight in A raisin in the Sun
* Similar in Trifles: house is telling part of the story
* Staging creates a "slice of life"
* Single set focuses attention on the domestic space/domestic life (Happening in the home): we behave differently in family rather than in public
* Relationship between the family members and relationship between the family and the outside
* Have a very realistic rendering of the stage (Kitchen together with the bedroom - lots of shared space)
* House is both a safe place and a place under siege (there are things outside the house with the rounding stage)
* Karl come in and bring in the hostility that constantly surround the house
* House itself becomes a metaphors of the family unit and a intermediate ground between the family member and their friction with the outside world.

## Tragedy - a quick refresher
the human being struggles to overcome some antagonistic force and is ultimately defeated
## Comedy usually breaks the rules (but usually has its own rules)
* "a form of drama that is distinguished by humorous content and endings that are, on balance 'happy' ones"
* Highlight absurdities of their society's norms and values
* Carnivalesque(characteristic of a carnival or festival) turning the world upside down to reveal and release tensions
* People wear whatever they want
* Do whatever they want
* Some person becomes king of the carnival (usually someone from the low place)
* Opportunity to turn the society upside down
## Order! Order! From Aristotle to French Neoclassicism (Very strong hierarchy and monarchy)
* Verisimilitude - the appearance of being true or real (Want stage to look as real as possible)
* Plays need to happen in real time
* Decorum - appropriate behavior to one's status within the society
* Man won't become emotional only woman will
* Women having higher status have more dignified emotion
* The Three Unities - Time, Place, and Action
* 24h
* One place
* One plot (No subplot)

Kings are the high people making significant mistakes in tragedy.
Lower-status people are characters in the comedy.
## Neoclassical Comedy Sets its Own Rules
* Unities, Verismilitude, Decorum still largely in play
* Comedies tend to happen to lower classes of people. Kings are not funny
* Usually end in marriage: the social order disrupted briefly in the course of the play is righted at the end: imply the younger generation will continue the traditional practice of living

## Tragicomedy: breaking rules by combining styles
* Always been around in various forms
* Captures the sense of comic in the tragic, and the tragic in the comic (Life is never purely any one of them but a mixture)
* Something comic happens in tragedy: the impermanence of life -> life continue -> making life more profound
* Becomes more accepted as a credible style from the nineteenth century onwards.

## Domestic Tragedy and Kitchen Sink Dramas
* Domestic tragedies examine the woes of the middle and working classes. Tended to be very moralistic. Started in early 1700s. (Teaching the working/middle class how to behave morally)
* Don't be bad at your boss
* Obey your father
* Don't drink too much
* [Kitchen Sinks Dramas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitchen_sink_realism) seeks to examine working class characters, but with a political bite. Notion of little touches tell us the struggle of a family.

## Finding the noble in the ordinary person [Arthur Miller](http://mr-shannon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/tragedymillerandaristotle.pdf)
* Published at the New York Times
* Writing in the wake of WWII: Cultural mood: empires breaking up, industry and technology bomming, memory and fear of tyrannical governments
* Wanted a tragic form the addressed the human experience in a largely democratic, industrial world.
* Hard for modern society to related to the downfall of kings
* Optimism in tragedy

## Miller on what drives the tragic hero
"The quality (in classical tragedy) that does shake us, however, derives from the underlying fear of being displaced, the disaster inherent in being torn away from our chosen image of what and who we are in this world. Among us today this fear is strong, and perhaps stronger than it ever was. In fact it is the common man who knows this fear best"

## The common Person as Hero: What they face

### "Fatal Flaw"
The flaw is not "necessarily a weakness". The flaw in the character is really nothing - and need be nothing - but his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status.

Guts tell heroes to resist the systematic injustice that keep crushing them

### Tragedy is more optimistic than comedy
"As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure on thing - his sense of personal dignity"

### We can have a "happy ending" and a tragedy
* The possibility of victory must be there in tragedy...
* Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible
* Sense of that human can stand and strive for themselves and people around them makes tragedy more optimistic and meaningful

## Tragic ending V.S Happy mood
Individuals have stood up against the society for their humanity and dignity

## Raisin in the sun (Second Chapter)
### Intersectional Perspectives on Drama
* Per Miller's "Tragedy and the Common Man," we need to find new ways of not only writing about characters but thinking about characters beyond the binary understanding.

#### Some binaries from Medea
* God/Human
* King/Commoner
* Man/Woman
* Adult/Child
* Citizen/Foreigner
:::info
How do top/down hierachies misshape understanding?
:::

### Critical Race Theory: Intersectionality
* an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members but often fail to represent them.
* Crenshaw developed this theory while trying anti-discrimination cases...

### Matrix of Domination - Patricia Hill Collins
* Similarly, Collins called for moving away from either/or to both/and conceptions of identity and power.
> Embracing a both/and conceptual stance moves us from additive, separate systems approaches to oppression and toward what I now see as the more fundamental issue of the social relations of domination. Race, class, and gender constitute axes of oppression that characterize Black women's experiences within a more generalized matrix of domination. Other groups may encounter different dimensions of the matrix, such as sexual orientation, religion, and age, but the overarching relationship is one of domination and the types of activism it generates.
[Link](http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/252.html)

Instead visualizing power in 1-d case, we need to visualize the social relationships as a 3d model: some of us has power in certain aspect but rely on others on other aspect

### Hansberry wrote to her Mama
> Mama, it is a play that tells the truth about people. [African American] and life and I think it will help a lot of people to understand how we are just as complicated as they are - and just as mixed up - but above all, that we have among our miserable and downtrodden ranks - people who are the very essence of human dignity. That is what, after all the laughter and tears, the play is supposed to say

### Hansberry's response to uncomplicated readings of her characters
* The play is about human, about the specificity of a specific group of people at a specific time

### Acting strategies for American Realist Theatre: "The Method"
Actors read the text and then create subtext
* **Subtext** - the emotions and thoughts that are unspoken for the character that the actor performs (how to create expression, notion, physicality that creates depth within the role)
* **Choices** - physical manifestations of character in performance (vocal inflection, gesture, etc.)
* **Objective** - the motivating factor that drives the actors' performance through a beat a scene, an act of a play. A **superobjective** is the character's overarching motivation

### Super-objective for the roles
* Walter's quest for Respect
* Beneatha's Quest for Knowledge
* Lena's quest for Freedom

> The hero's unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what appears to be a challenge to his dignity, his image, or his rightful status

Walter: 1. makes financial deal; 2. keeps Mama's plan to move even after financial deal falls through; 3. supports family dreams
Beneatha: 1. pursues education; 2. explores identity; 3. Forgets brother and supports family
Lenna: 1. Helps her children emotionally, financially; 2. Buys a house; 3. Empowers her children

### End of the play: Conflicts resolved but challenges ahead
:::info
Walter speaks for the family, refuses Lindner's money
:::

# Machinal(1928)
## Sophie Treadwell
* Born in California
* Studied French at UC-Berkeley became involved in theater
* Journalism career included covering World War I from the front lines, the Mexican Revolution
* One of the few women not working in nursery, medic, ambulance driver
* She was very adventurous, brave.
* Successful Broadway Playwright
* Moved back west later in life
## A play about human alienation
* Situated in 1920s New York City
* Huge growth in economy, industrialization
* Focus on speed, productivity
* Main character feels she cannot keep the pace with the society -> seeking for a different life style -> alienation
* Exposes gender expectations
* Industrial dehumanization
* Societal inequities
* Society makes the life easier/harder for specific people
## How does theatrical expressionism Shape Meaning in Machinal
* Episodic Structure: One event at a place at a time; Another happens at different combinations; even though the events are still linear, but scattered around.
* Eight scenes, divided into two parts (before and after birth of child)
* Traditional linear format of exposition, rising action, single climax, denouement not being used here.
* The social status of the characters can be represented both through text and visualization of scenes (Spatial Relationship)
## Acting Style in Machinal
* Not realistic
* Stream of consciousness: words come under chaotic emotional breakdown
* Use of cliches, "polite, meaningless words": tell us how people fit in the specific society; how well they know the places
* Gestures, behaviors offer insight into psychology of character: the interior feelings of the protagonist is expressed on stage through behaviors
## More on expressionism, per our textbook
* Primal gesture: gesture is exaggerated and very expressive
* Punctuated dialogue: People speak with very strange response -> Very artificial and create emotionality
* Theatrical design that includes exaggerated or distorted images
* Play staged "so that it reflects the emotional perspective of the protagonist as hero" (1821)
## Machinal and "The Rhythm of Work"
:::info
Workplace is usually very noisy.
Rhythm becomes more important under the wave of industrialization
:::
* The Assembly Line: everyone has to work on the same speed; being part of a larger machine can feel great; but also emotional draining, oppressive.
* The Switch Board
* The Typewriter

## Working in the Machine Age
* Most machines not portable
* Most people in the office had to be in the same place at the same time
* How does Machinal perform the relationship between the machines and their operators
## Treadwell's Sound Categories
:::info
The play includes voice sound from people: who flirt, smile, cry
On the other side, we have mechanical sound.
:::
* Voices
* Offstage
* Onstage
* Mechanical Sounds
* Offstage
* Onstage
## Sound Design in Machinal
* Machines
* Human voices at work
* Human voices outside of work
* Music
* Sounds can be in rhythm or out of rhythm
* Help us understand why the young woman is so uncomfortable while working and why her colleague are so unsatisfactory towards her
*
## Sounding Out Episode One: Noise from work is in rhythm -> Sense of efficiency and productivity
* Characters and their Machines
* A Young Woman [Typewriter]
* A stenographer [Typewriter]
* A Young Clerk [Filing cabinet and manifold]
* An Adding Clerk [Adding Machine]
* Telephone Operator [Switchboard]
* Even gossip seems like in rhythm
## Visual Design in Machinal: the first division
| Episode | Door | Window |
|----------------|----------------|------------------------|
| 1. To Business | to VP's Office | an opposite office |
| 2. At Home | to Hall | an inner apt. court |
| 3. Honeymoon* | to bathroom | window of dance casino |
| Maternal | corridor | steel girders |

:::info
Scene becomes much more oppressive and constrained
:::
| Episode | No Door | Window |
|---------------|---------|------------------------------|
| 5. Prohibited | | Masked |
| 6. Intimate | | Disclosed (sidewalk outside) |
| 7. Domestic | | Curtain |
| 8. The Law | | Masked |
| 9. A machine | | Disclosed (sky outside) |

## Questions
* How does she conform
* How does she not conform

## For next time: Other machines in Machinal
* The Media (The Ruth Snyder Case)
* Economic and Racial Stratifications, Segregations
* Prefessional Systems
* Medicine
* Law
* Criminal Corrections - The Chair

# Machinal's Machines
## Electrical Chair
* Humane way of capital punishment and the gift of electricity
## Young woman as "Wrench in the Works"
* "Ordinary"
* "The confusion of her own inner thoughts, emotions, desires, dreams cuts her off from any actual adjustment to the routine of work"
* "She is preoccupied with herself - with her person"

## The Young Woman's Language
* Short and/or incomplete sentences (Lack of ability to express herself clearly)
* Stream of consciousness speeches
* Rote answers(1030)
* Silence/withdrawal
* Initiation of conversation, connection (1025)

## The Young Woman as Wrench in the Works
* How does she conform?
* How does she not conform?
* Failed attempts
* Resistance
* Racial Stratifications and Segregations
* The Young Man's attitude towards persons of color
* The African-American singer in Episode Nine.
* Economic Stratifications
* Workplace structure- white collar, pink collar, blue collar, no collar
* Is mobility possible? For whom?
* Young woman has the mobility to go from a poor family to a rich class (with her personal attraction)
## Young woman does not have her own voice
* Medical System
* Hierachy within profession
* Patient is not consulted or believed
* Legal System
* Lawyers do talking, interpreting
* Capital Punishment
* Religion
* The Priest vs. The Singer

:::info
Not only the subjective experience of the woman, but how the society becomes much more complex with the collaboration between people.
:::

## Episode 5: Prohibited
* Three tables, three stories (The other two tables are very serious. conversations are hard to conduct)
* One table with the young woman meeting two young man
* Two homosexual, young and old, negotiate on drinking wine?
* Man and woman discuss whether to terminate woman's pregnancy
* Stories revealed through dialogue in convert/juxtaposition
* What systems operate in this scene that are different from other scenes?
* Ordering two alcoholic drink secretly (Otherwise, may get busted) (V-hand gesture)

## Episode 9: A Machine
* Who is talking?
* Who is listening?
* What is heard?

Machinal and the Ruth
Synder Case:
What was seen?

* For Snyder' execution at Sing Sing Prison, The New York Daily News hired Tom Howard, a photographer from Chicago, to sneak a cameria into the execution in his pants leg. The photographer took a picture during the moments of execution, which graced the cover of the newspaper the next day with the headline, "Dead!".

## What does this play say
* Humankind's relationship to machines.
* Women in early twentieth-century America
* The relationship between news events and entertainment ("Ripped from the headlines")
* Individual's need for companionship and/or community connection

# Samuel Beckett and the Theater of the Absurd

## Samuel Beckett
* Born in Ireland, Friday, April 13, 1906
* Studied literature at university (Expert on French and study 4 languages)
* 1931 - move to Paris (Teaching language and experience life)
* Move to global portal
* Get involved in art movement and collaborate with other great artists
* "all writing ... is bound to fail" Impossible to move one language to another
* Always impossible to make exact communication
* But exactly the failure which makes writing fascinating
* James Joyce's Secretary (Together they play with language and meaning)
* Join french resistance when it is controlled by Nazi (Military reaction/Spying to undermine the control of France)
* Nobel Prize (1969)
* Write and directed plays well into his 80s, died in Paris in 1989

## Existentialists
* Human beings are, individually, responsible for making themselves what they are, and that without making a free and conscious choice before taking action, one cannot truly be said, "to exist as a human being".
* Human always possess the choice to accept/reject religious believes and cultural norms
* Process and responsibility of defining who we are
* Why after World War II
* Main's inhumanity to man
* The banality of evil (Hanna Arendt):darkness and desperateness over the War. All evil things become normalized. The atrocity and evilness becomes everyday - becomes banal. What would it be for a perfect nice person follow orders to do awful things. -> Leads to reflection over the responsibility of one reflecting over his own action instead of following the commands.
* The holocaust
* The atomic bomb
* Existentialism challenges both divine and political authority, instead demanding tha tindividuals find their own avenue to ethical, meaningful lives

> A world that can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a
> familiar world. But in a universe that is suddenly deprived of
> illusions and of light, man feels a stranger. His is an irremediable
> exile. Because he is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as
> much as he lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This
> divorce between man and his setting truly constitute the filling of
> Absurdity.

[Link] (https://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/44120/10/10_chapter%205.pdf)

## In performance, the response to existentialism is the "theatre of the absurd"
* Something which is absurd is "out of harmony".
* The theatre of the absurd illustrates the absurdity of the human condition and the unthinking way people accept notions of morality and society that do not mean what they appear to.
* Tipping one's hat to a blind man

> "The Theatre of the Absurd has renounced arguing about the absurdity of the human condition; it merely presents it in being -- that is, in terms of concrete stage images. This is the difference between the approach of the philosopher and that of the poet."

## Beckett's Project: Rethinking the Theatre
* Careful control of production elements (Control over how many steps can be made by the actors)
* Time(tempo, rhythm)
* Space(setting, constraints)
* Acting (requirements for the actor)
* Sound (words as sounds)
* Audience (tension, repetition, visual/visceral jokes)

## Rethinking "Interpretation"
* Anti-psychological (unable to understand any psychological path of the actors)
* No "motivation" or "objective"
* Actor as athlete
* "The actor is an athlete of the heart" (Antonin Artaud)
* What happens to interpretation?
* "The key word in my plays is 'perhaps'" (Beckett)

## Thinking about Waiting for Godot
* What's it like reading a play with no exposition?
* How does time function in Waiting for Godot? How do the characters experience time? How does the audience experience time?

## Vladimire and Estragon, The (Tragi) Comic Duo
* INtellectual/ Emotional
* Strong/Weak
* Leader/Follower

### Abbot and Costello: "Who's on First"
* Wordplay (tend to talk very quickly;use a lot of puns)
* Exaggerated Reactions
* Generative humor that leads to absurdity (Jokes built on each other and develop into absurdity)

### The Marx Brothers: "The hat gag"
* A cunning behavior born out of desperation
* Ignoring of social norms
* Slapstick shielding potential for real violence

## Pozzo and Lucky: Another Comic Pair?
* How does their relationship parallel that of Vladimir and Estragon?
* How is it different?

## The Passage of Time in Waiting for Godot
* Immediate past (the bratings, recent visits)
* Long-term past (climbing the Eiffel Tower, visiting the Macon)
* Indefinite past (time between Act I and Act II) (A day or longer?)
* How does the play differ between real and perceived time?

## The Holes of Memory and Historical Trauma (Perhaps?) - ALL THE DEAD VOICES

## How do we respond?
> I can't go on. I'll go on

# Brecht's epic theatre, and contemporary drama
> "When something seems the 'most obvious thing in the world it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up".

## Grew out of
* Other avant-garde movements of the time (Anti-realism)
* Leftist Politics (Inherently set up to encourage us view the world in a political way)
* Historical Events
* Style continues to influence theater, film, television and performance today

## What inspired the form (Encourage people to seek for more comprehensive answer to the problems in society)
* Innovation in theatre technology
* World War I and its aftermath in 1920s Germany
* Hyperinflation (very dramatic), poverty, anxiety lead to deep mistrust in government, traditional social systems, to rise of Nazi party, which claims that Germany was "stabbed in the back" at the Versailles Treaty, and that they would make Germany the greatest power in the world.

## The people behind the form
* Bertoit Brecht (1889 - 1956)
* Raised middle class in Germany
* Good education
* Drafted into WWI
* Political artist reluctant to identify himself too closely to a particular political party
* Theatre work internationally recognized in 1930s
* Fled Germany with rise of Nazis in 1933
* Erwin Piscator (1893 - 1966)
* Designer, director, theorist
* Heavily influenced by expressionism, other avant-garde movements
* Incorporated film images, other art works into his sets
## Brecht's Art Collaborators
* Helene Weigel/Kurt Weill

## What does Epic Theatre Want to Do?
* Question the things we have stopped even thinking about.
* "When something seems 'the most obvious thing in the world, it means that any attempt to understand the world has been given up."

## Some Elements of Epic Theater
* Audience should not get emotionally swept away by the play, so that they consume unthinkingly what is presented to them. Brecht called theaer that played to emotions/sentiment over thought "culinary theater".
* Vivid gestures and diction
* THE GESTUS
* a gesture or tableau that captures visibly an understanding or interpretation of a social situation (A snapshot of the social relationship of power)
* Defines characters' social relationships, rather than encouraging us to think about characters psychologically or emotionally
* Self-conscious theatricality
* Actors engage with the audience and comment on the events portrayed through action, words, song
* Mixture of "high" and "low" art forms (Between Shakespere and Super-Bowl show)
* Set is seen to be "fake"
* Lighting fixtures, music sources visible (Make audience very conscious of these unnatural special effects)
* Theater does not pretend to be "magic"
* Episodic Structure
* Eac scene self-contained
* "Avoid any sense of continuity of action"
* No Suspense about What Will Happen
* Audience told what the outcome will be at the beginning of an episode
* Thus focus not on WHAT but instead on HOW or WHY?
* Audience pay attention to what lead the characters to his/her outcome
## Alienation Effect on Audience
> Audience is "emotionally detached an intellectually alert" -- Lee Jacobus

## Brecht's Idea Audience Member
* Cries when characters laugh, laugh when characters cry
* Constantly asks why characters behaving as they do (Try to analyze all elements in the play)
* Has the relaxed concentration of someone watching a sporting match
* Is smoking a cigarette

## Vogel's Layered Play Structure
* Non-linear
* Complex
* Use multiple narratives

## The Story - Here in chronological order, unlike in hte play itself
How doe the non-linear structure help create critical distance for the audience?
* 1952 - Li'l Bit born
* 1962 - First "Lesson"
* 1964 - Arrangement
* 1968 - Driver's licence
* 1969 - College/breakup
* 1976 - Peck dies
* 1987 - Li'l Bit tells her story (the play)

## Li'il Bit's Monologues
* Li'l Bit comments on events that have happened in her life that are outside the "pedophilia plot," but are related to that plot.
* She's kicked out of colleges
* She seduces a boy on a bus
* She talks about Uncle Peck's death

## Scenes of Li'il Bit's family Life
* Put the pedophilia in the context of the dysfunctionality/unhappiness in Li'l Bit's family
* Li'il Bits's birth
* Women in the family's discussion of sex (no boundary, no ability to establish themselves for individuals)
* Peck's relationship with BB (not the only victim)

## Poetic Episodes and Music
Driving as a metaphor of sense of freedom and power, symbols for sex
* Take place outside time and space
* "Mother's Guide to Social Drinking"
* Choral Ode
* "Recipe for a Southern Man"
* Songs sung by Chorus or used in Soundtrack

## Questions ...
* How do Vogel's playwrighting techniques affect the way we react to the play's content?
* What challenges does this play create for actors, directors, designers, audience members?

# Epic Theater in detail
## How doe Epic Theatre Work?
* Makes transparent a point of view about events it describes
* Actors do not "disappear" into their role, but remain detached from the characters they are playing
* Settings likewise use devices that remind us that we are watching a play

## Isn't a theatre for instruction going to be boring?
* Learning and discovering things can be fun, and this theatre should be fun as well as instructive
* Not interested in telling people what to think

## Is epic theatre some kind of moral institution
> "We are not speaking (through our plays) not in the name of morality, but in that of the vectims. These truly are two distinct matters, for the victims are often told that they ought to be contended with their lot, for moral reasons. Moralists of this sort see man as existing for morality"

# How I Learned to Drive as Postmodern Drama
> A lot of thinking about where I'm going next

## Post-modernism
* Describe particular art movement after II WW.
* Rejects singular artistic vision of modernist art (Present a point of view that encourages readers to interpret)
* Giving viewers a "way in"
* Citationality: reference to part of the popular culture in the course of work
* Multiple points of views/styles/techniques (Post-modern architecture: Modern interior design but with dorm on top - two historical ideas in architecture thrown towards each other)
* Questioning the "authority" of the author (very democratic) (Maryland Monroe is a combination of ideas)
## Elements of Postmodern Style in Theater
* Stylistic "Quotation"
* Fragmented Visual elements
* Disintegrated plot and characters (Motivation and relationship between characters are not revealed)
* Multiplicity of meaning (Perhaps ... Perhaps ... many ways the work can be interpreted)
* Contrast these qualities to Aristotelian notions of wholeness, seamlessness, logical characterizations, singleness of plot, consistency ...

## Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" as Postmodern Art
* Stylistic "quotation"
* Fragmented visual elements
* Disintegrated plot and characters
* Multiplicity of

## What makes fragmentation a useful approach in the context of *How I Learned to Drive*
* Epic Theatre's Distancing of audience from Events on Stage
* Character Complexity and Conflicts in Personality & Behavior
* Post-modernism allows more space for character development
* Moral Ambiguity
* No fixed hierarchy or through-line telling us what things mean

## Quotations in Vogel's Play
* Greek chorous
* Collage techniques (Visual design technique)
* Images: road signs, magazine images, suggestive photographs
* Sounds: 60's music, driving manual voice, sacred music
* Not to create a holistic picture but adds more meanings to the play's interpretations
* Lewis Carroll's photograph of Alice Liddell, suggested by Vogel as one of the images in the photo shoot scene

## Fragmented Visual Elements - Staging
* Characters isolated from one another physical/visually
* Everybody sits around the table but every body sits away from the table and each other
* Members of the family is distant to each other and in very different situation
* Make the sense that we are not looking at the real world
* Chorus members are in a whole different light
* Character relationships shifting and unstable
* Place loosely defined, changeable

## America's romance with the car
* Masculinity
* Power
* Freedom
* Sexuality
* Consumption

## The cycle of abuse
* Family attitudes towards sexuality
* Cultural attitudes toward young girls
* Peck and Li'l Bit's sexual timelines

## Disintegrated Plot and Characters
> "What makes a really good production is letting a play be mysterious and fragile .. " -- Paula Vogel

## What is the effect of the postmodern style of the show?
* Dialogue with/among audience
* Radical openness
* Room for interpretation

> "I always feel that I'm writing the script and my audience is writing the play. The fact that 200 people can go in there and come out to have arguments in the car and lobby, and that everyone is always right: That makes it an ideal platform for democracy"

# The American Play (Digging into the Whole of history)
* Intertextual
* Framgent Visual Elements
* Disintegrated Plot and Characters
* Uses multiple points of view/styles/techniques
* Questions "authority" of playwright
* "Radical Openness"
* Rep and Rev

## Repetition and Revision (Rep and rev)
* A style often used in jazz composition in which a theme is returned to multiple times, but each time is performed in a slightly different way.
* John Coltrane's jazz version of "My favourite things" from *The Sound of Music* (Check Ariana Grande)

## What is the America in *The America Play*?
* The United States
* A continent
* Two continents
* A history
* A cultural idea
* A hole
* A whole
* People
* Peoples

## How do we remember history?
* Telling, writing narratives of history (historiography)
* Collecting and curating objects from the past (archeology)
* Making art (arat)
* Reenacting events
* Remembering shaped not only by the past, but by the desires and fears of the present

## When we remember history ...
* What is repeated?
* What is hidden?
* What is forgotten?
* What is repressed?

## Historical Referents
* Abraham Lincoln
* Civil War President
* Iconic Physicality
* Untimely assassination changes course of history (Andrew Johnson led the reconstruction as a consequence)
* John Wilkes Booth
* Assassinated Lincoln
* Famous Actor
* Brother of greatest actor of the time

* Our American Cousin
* An American relative visting England saves his English relatives from ruin
* The play being performed when Lincoln assasinated
* Laura Keene
* Actor and Theatre Director
* On stage when Lincoln is shot
* "The West"
* Westward Expansion
* "Back east" vs. "Out west"
* Manifest Destiny
* Adventure and Reinvention
* Violence and Displacement
* Finding a fortune
* Gold rushes
* Land Claims

## What about the Characters' Histories?
* The Foundling Father/Lesser Known
* A Digger
* A Griever
* An Actor
* A husband and Father
* Lucy
* A confidence
* A wife and mother
* A listener
* Knew and kept Bram Price's secret
* Brazil
* Griever (Gnasher)
* Digger
* Son
* Showman (Actor?)
* The Visitors (ACT I) and Actors (ACT II)
* How are the visitors actors?
* How are the actors visitors?
## Power of Structure
* Act I: The Lincoln Act
* Lincoln describes his work and history in the third person
* Story interpersed with Lincoln's re-enactment of the assassination for visitors
* Act II: The Hall of Wonders
* Lucy and Brazil in dialogue as they excavate (the replica of) the hole of history
* Objects
* Sounds
* Stories
* Their story interpersed with "Echoes" (Calling back)

## Repetition and Revision
* End of Act One: "A gunshot echoes. Softly. And echoes."
* End of Act Two: "A gunshot echoes. Loudly. And echoes."

# Final Review
* The Gas Heart 1910
* Machinal 205
* A raisin in the Sun 505
* Waiting for Godot 505
* How I Learned to Drive 905
* The America Play 905
## Genres/Styles Play
* Dada: Avant Garde Theatrical event -attack traditional ways of seeing the world
* Postmodern: Expressionism: Visual elements are over Exaggerated; Stream of Consciousness
* Absurdism: Theater of absurd; Philosophy behind it is Existentialism - World is chaotic, godless; it is up to the individual to make sense of Existentialism; Not really Anarchy, but encourage individual to take responsbility for our actions
* Realism: trying to portray the world as it is; emphasizing people in the real world. Arthur Miller: common people being hero; Redefine tragedy (Contrast to Greek Play, tragic stories are now about common people rather than king)
* Epic: How I learned do Drive: Encourage people to think play without being emotional;
* The American Play: Postmodernism, lots of symbolism.

# Final Lecture
* Everything since The Gas Heart
* Choose the "best answer", the most straightforward answer.
* The answer to the question is already on the test.

## What we worked on
* 11 plus play texts and background materials
* 2 plus live performances
* 3 plus theoretical readings
## Style of Theater
* Aristotelian Tragedy
* Noh Drama
* Shakespearean Drama
* Realism
* Avant-garde/Dada (Gas Heart)
* Expressionism
* Epic Theater
* Theatre of the Absurd
* Postcolonialism (King's horseman)
* Postmodernism (American Play)
* Melodrama
## Accomplishments
* Developed a foundational understanding of major structural, thematic, and aesthetic issues surrounding theater and drama production, criticism and theory
* Elements of Theatrical Production
* Analysis of images and text
* Acting out plays in readings, acting, exercises, etc.
* Developed a foundational understanding of major genres and styles of theater and drama, and their historical and cultural contexts
* Background reading and lectures
* Aristotle, "from Poetics"
* Zeami, from A Mirror Held to the Flower
* Tzara, from "Dada Manifesto"
* Brecht, "Theater for Pleasure or Theater for Instruction"
* Soynika, from "Myth, Litrature and the African World"
* Pakrs, from "Elements of Style"

## Questions:
* Should I know more about the movement of Dada or more about the plot of Gas in Heart
* Genre: How I learn to drive (What aspect of it is postmodern and what aspect of is Epic Theater)
* American play: How are actors visistors and how are visitors actors. Repetition and revision. Words, phrases Actors in act II put slightly modified scenes from American Cousin. (Visitors)
* What does the (w)hole mean: whole of history. It is a pun.
*