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tags: DramaSix, terms
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# Key Terms: Class Nine

### Stage Pictoralism
- Garrick’s acting addressed its audience as a painting addresses its viewers, relying on poses and attitudes arranged according to accepted standards of compositional harmony and grace.
- "a picturesque stylization of reality"
- to expose the Ideal hidden in the real
- to bring artful focus and beauty to stage representations
- to give the audience an experience of Spirit transcending the limitations of the physical
- See Weimar style

#### Moving from Pictoralism to Realism
- Familiar objects taken from daily life and transferred to the stage provided audiences with a sense of recognition and familiarity that validated the action as true and authentic.The simplicity of the story or dramatic structure was hidden under a veneer of lived reality, represented by a growing accumulation of the stuff of daily life.
- Recognizable real-world environments
- Accumulation of the stuff of life to create a sense of lived reality
- Encouraging recognition and engagement in the audience through “authenticity”
- Dramatizing life to make it known
- Realism aimed to rid the stage of pictorialism by creating the illusion of life being lived before the unacknowledged gaze of observes without being observed. The focus shifts from creating stage pictures to mirroring lived reality on stage.
- Attend to things themselves and a sense of lived reality in the present and not the idealizing conventions of the past
- Expand the subject matter of art to include other experiences and other conditions
- Record the complexity of life in the present in all its details in order to reveal the deeper structures that give meaning to surface phenomena

### Gas Lighting
- History of Gas
- In 1803 the German-born inventor F. A. Winsor introduced the technology for indoor illumination using coal-gas. In 1807 he brought gas lighting to London’s Pall Mall.
- Gas in the Theater
- In 1816, the Chestnut Street Theater in Philadelphia inaugurated a new era of theatrical lighting.
- In 1826 the English engineer Thomas Drummond invented the Drummond Light capable of harnessing the “limelight effect” for use in surveying.
- By 1837, Drummond Lights were being used to spotlight actors at Covent Garden.
- The Drummond light increased the pictorial possibilities of the stage by spot-lighting actors at crucial moments.
- By the 1840s, all sources of light in the theater could be controlled from a single gas table in the wings.
- Increased likelyhood of [fires](/T9pJ9PsNRSyiHfakGZT2NQ#Safe-Theater)

### Antiquarianism
- "Interest in historical accuracy and the “heightened pictorialism”
- Charles Keen
- Duke of Saxe-Meiningen

### Meininger Troupe
- Between 1874 and 1890, the Meininger Troupe created a sensation in tours across Europe of productions that were considered the epitome of artistic excellence and models of the new realism.
### Box Set
- The Box Set replaced painted interiors and painted furniture with a room-like set with walls and a ceiling.
- By the 1880s, the box set was in general use across Europe and America
- See Lucia Elizabeth Vestris
### Pièce bien faite (Well-Made Play)
- Scribe's plays structured a satisfying theatrical experience out of the foibles of upper middle-class life for a largely upper middle-class audience.
- Scribe’s plays centered on a carefully crafted sense of dramatic suspense that always led to a happy ending for characters that the audience had come to care about.
- The plot of the well-made play was propelled by an inexorable logic that made the actions seem both plausible and natural. This introduced a new paradigm for stage representation, shifting away from pictorialism to illusionism by focusing on the arrangement of events rather than spectacular scenic displays.

Scribe’s formula for the “Well-Made Play”:
1) A carefully prepared exposition introduces an event or incident that precipitates a crisis within an already unstable situation
2) A series of complications arise as the central characters attempt to overcome a series of increasingly complex obstacles
3) The resolution of one difficulty leads directly and logically to new difficulties, increasing suspense and dramatic tension
4) A crucial confrontation between protagonist and antagonist in which the secrets are revealed
5) Dénouement(unraveling of tension) and resolution of the action

- Late point of attack
- Thorough exposition
- Logical causality
- Maintaining suspense to the end
- Happy ending after a series of dramatically suspenseful complications

### Scenic Revolution
- shifting attention from visual effects created by the stage machinist to cerebral effects created by the playwright
- Audiences came to see what the machinists would come up with next.
- Playwrights wrote scenes for the new possibilities of the pictorial stage, creating demand for more three-dimensional practical scenic pieces by making them central to the action of their plays.
### Gentlemanly Melodrama
- “Gentlemanly Melodramas” adapted melodramatic characters, situations and plot conventions for fashionable, middle-class audiences. They were praised as realistic, insightful, and moving. Domestic rather thanexotic, these plays offered “sophisticated entertainment” for a “discriminating audience.”

### Boulevard Theater
- The commercial “boulevard theaters” of Paris and the west-end theaters of London were embraced by upper middle-class audiences out for an evening’s entertainment. They offered unambitious commercial fare and inoffensive comedies.
- Napoleon’s Decree of 1807
- Napoleon authorized four theaters on the Boulevard du Temple:Théâtre du Vaudeville (short plays an vaudevilles with songs set to familiar melodies)Théâtre des Variétés (skits and short farces that employed vulgar or provincial dialects)Théâtre de la Gaîté (pantomimes and harlequinades in the style of Nicolet)Théâtre de l'Ambigu-Comique(spectacles and melodramas) Napoleon Bonaparte
- Théâtre du GymnaseWhen the Théâtre du Gymnase opened in 1820 it was considered the most fashionable theater in Paris. Thanks to Scribe (and Montigny) it retained its reputation through the 19th century for offering “modern comedies” that were literate and entertaining. In later years, playwrights from Balzac and Georges Sand to Émile Augier and Alexandre Dumas fils contributed to the repertory at the Théâtre du Gymnase.

## Additional

### Safe Theater
- Theater Fires
- Audiences came to expect that for the price of admission, the theater management should guarantee their safety.
- Audiences came to expect that for the price of admission, the theater management should guarantee their safety.186 people died when the Royal Theatre Exeter burned in 1887 leading the government to pass regulations governing theater safety.

### Market Revolution
- Theater shifted from a cultural haven for the elite to a place of popular entertainment.
- As theaters expanded to accommodate larger audiences, and stages expanded to accommodate more spectacle, spectacle increased to draw in larger audiences.
- When Covent Garden was built in 1732 it could accommodate 1400 spectators. When it was rebuilt in 1794 it sat 3000.
- Wren’s Theatre Royal on Drury Lane was expanded during the 18th century to accommodate between 1500 and 2000 spectators.

### "The Weimar Style"
- At Weimar, Goethe strove for an harmonious and picturesque stylization of reality was paramount.
- Drilled his company in elocution, social behavior, and verse-speaking
- Insisted that each line be spoken with elegance and due regard for metrical structures
- Instructed his actors to find stylized gestures that would convey a sense of ideal beauty and communicate the “essence” of their character
- Arranged his actors in rehearsal into harmonious stage pictures
- Emphasized grace, symmetry, and self-restraint to bring the inner harmony and beauty of spoken verse to life on stage
- Acting came to rely less on nuance and more on grand gestures to indicate emotion.
- While Romantic actors like Talma or Kean or Forrest prized expressiveness over decorum, they still envisioned acting as a pictorial art form: a form of display before an audience.

Example
: From Goethe’s “91 Rules for the Actors”
: 35 “ ... the actor must understand that he not only should imitate nature but present it ideally ... uniting the true with the beautiful”
: 36 “ ... the actor must gain complete control over every part of his body so that he may use each part freely, harmoniously and gracefully as expression demands.”
: 39 “The actors should not out of a mistaken idea of naturalness play to each other as if no third person were present. They should never play in profile or turn their backs to the audience …”
: NB: Actors were fined if they broke any of these rules