Chapter 4 - The Lively Art, PDF

76 THEATRICAL GENRES 4 When we attend a theatre performance, within the first fifteen minutes or so, we sense a tone and a mood that are being communicated. We become aware that those presenting the play—the playwright, the...

76 THEATRICAL GENRES 4 When we attend a theatre performance, within the first fifteen minutes or so, we sense a tone and a mood that are being communicated. We become aware that those presenting the play—the playwright, the actors, the director—are signaling to the audience that they have adopted a definite point of view and attitude toward what is to follow. For example, in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears to men on guard at the castle. It is an omi- nous, eerie scene that tells us this will be a serious play, perhaps even a tragedy. On the other hand, at the beginning of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus, the Duke of Athens, says: “Stir up the Athenian youth to ­merriment, awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth,” a clear sign that this will be a comedy. TYPES OF DRAMA In Greece in the fifth century b.c. e., where Western theatre began, the actors wore masks covering their faces when they performed. The Greeks took the idea of the mask to create symbols of the two kinds of plays presented at their dramatic festivals—the mask of tragedy and the mask of comedy—symbols that are still used today. Similarly, in Japan in the fourteenth century c. e., a theatre called nō Genre A French word had become established as the serious form of drama. Alongside nō, however, meaning type or category. was a comical, farcical type of drama called kyōgen. In theatre, genre denotes In other words, wherever theatre has appeared, there has been a tendency to the category into which a divide it into categories or types, often referred to by the French term genre play falls: for example, (JAHN-ruh). In addition to tragedy and comedy, additional genres have developed: tragedy, comedy, or farce, melodrama, tragicomedy, and a number of others. tragicomedy. DRAMATIC GENRE: COMEDY Drama is often divided into categories or types, referred to as genres. The Greeks separated tragedy and comedy. To those two genres have been added tragicomedy and others. Shown here are Kristine Nielsen as Mrs. Hardcastle, Jeremy Webb as George Hastings, and Rebecca Brooksher (rear) as Constance Neville in a comedy of wit written by Oliver Goldsmith, She Stoops to Conquer, which the eighteenth century author called “a laughing comedy.” The production was directed by Nicholas Martin at the McCarter Theatre. (©T. Charles Erickson) 77  This tendency to divide dramatic works into categories is not confined to theatre. We find it widespread, not only in the arts, but in many aspects of life. Not only those who create theatre adopt different points of view toward events and toward life in general; all of us do. Depending on our perspective, we can see the same subject as funny or sad, take it seriously or laugh at it, make it an object of pity or of ridicule. Just why we look at events from different points of view is difficult to say, but there is no question that we do. The English author Horace Walpole (1717–1797) wrote: “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”1 In theatre, this question of viewpoint—looking at people or events from a par- ticular perspective—becomes crucial. Viewpoint is not taken for granted, as it is in everyday life; rather, it is a conscious act on the part of whoever creates the text. To take an example, in most cases death is considered a somber matter; but in his play Arsenic and Old Lace (1941), the dramatist Joseph Kesselring (1902–1967) makes it clear that in his play we are to regard death as comic. Kesselring presents two elderly women who kill no fewer than 12 old men by serving them arsenic in glasses of wine. But because the dramatist removes from the play any feeling that the deaths are to be taken seriously, he engenders in the audience the notion that it is all in fun. Before examining genre, we should note that often a play does not fit neatly into a single category. Those who create a text do not write categories or types of plays; they write individual, unique works—and preoccupation with genre may distract us from the individuality of a play or a production. Still, if we keep these reservations in mind, we will find that it is helpful to understand the traditional genres into which Western dramatic literature has fallen. TRAGEDY Serious drama takes a thoughtful, sober attitude toward its subject matter. It puts the spectators in a frame of mind to think about what they are seeing and to become involved with the characters onstage: to love what these characters love, fear what they fear, and suffer what they suffer. The best-known form of serious drama, to which we turn first, is tragedy. Other forms of serious theatre are heroic drama, domestic drama, and melodrama. Tragedy A serious drama Tragedy asks very basic questions about human existence. Why are people in which there is a downfall sometimes cruel to one another? Why is the world unjust? Why are men and of the primary character. women called on to endure suffering? What are the limits of human suffering and endurance? In the midst of cruelty and despair, what are the possibilities of human achievement? To what heights of courage, strength, generosity, and integrity can human beings rise? Tragedy assumes that the universe is indifferent to human concerns and often cruel and malevolent. Sometimes the innocent appear to suf- fer, whereas the evil prosper. In the face of this, some humans are capable of despicable deeds, but others can confront and overcome adversity, attaining a nobility that places them “a little lower than the angels.” We can divide tragedy into two basic kinds: traditional and modern. ­Traditional tragedy includes works from several significant periods of the past. Modern tragedy generally includes plays from the late nineteenth century to the present day. 1 Horace Walpole, letter to Anne, Countess of Ossory, August 16, 1776 78 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright Traditional Tragedy Tragic Heroes and Heroines Generally, the hero or heroine of a tragedy is an extraordinary person—a king, a queen, a general, a nobleman or noblewoman—in other words, a person of stature. In Greek drama, Antigone, Electra, Oedipus, Agamemnon, Creon, and Orestes are members of royal families. In the plays of Shakespeare, Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Lear, and Cordelia are also royal; Julius Caesar, ­Macbeth, and Othello are generals; and others— Ophelia, Romeo, and Juliet—are members of the nobility. Tragic Circumstances The central figures of the play are caught in a series of tragic circum- stances: Oedipus, without realizing it, murders MAJOR CHARACTERS CAUGHT IN A TRAGIC WEB In traditional tragedy the fall of a hero or heroine has a special his father and marries his mother; Antigone significance because of the combination of his or her personality must choose between death and dishonoring her and position. An example of a tragic heroine is the Duchess of dead brother; Phaedra falls hopelessly and Malfi in the play of the same name by John Webster. Despite her fatally in love with her stepson, Hippolytus; title and station in life, the duchess is taunted and destroyed by Othello is completely duped by Iago; and Lear her evil brothers when she marries someone of a lower social is cast out by the daughters to whom he has rank. Seen here are Ursina Lardi in the title role and Robert given his kingdom. In traditional tragedy, the Beyer as Bosola, one of the brothers, in a production at the universe seems determined to trap the hero or Schaubuehne Theatre in Berlin, Germany. (©ullstein bild/ullstein heroine in a fateful web and for that character bild/Getty Images) to suffer a tragic fall. Tragic Irretrievability The situation becomes irretrievable: There is no turning back. The tragic figures are in a situation from which there is no honorable avenue of escape; they must go forward to meet their fate. Acceptance of Responsibility The hero or heroine accepts responsibility for his or her actions and also shows willingness to suffer and an immense capacity for suffering. Oedipus puts out his own eyes; Antigone faces death with equanimity; Othello kills himself. King Lear suffers immensely, living through personal humil- iation, a raging storm on a heath, temporary insanity, and the death of his daugh- ter, and finally confronts his own death. A statement by Edgar in King Lear applies to all tragic figures: “Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither.”2 Tragic Verse The language of traditional tragedy is verse. Because it deals with lofty and profound ideas—with men and women at the outer limits of their lives—tragedy soars to the heights and descends to the depths of human experi- ence; and many feel that such thoughts and emotions can best be expressed in poetry. Look at Cleopatra’s lament on the death of Mark Antony. Her sense of 2 William Shakespeare, King Lear (1606), Act V, Scene 2. Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 79  admiration for Antony, and her desolation, could never be conveyed so tellingly in less poetic terms: Oh, wither’d is the garland of war, The soldier’s pole is fall’n! Young boys and girls Are level now with men. The odds is gone, And there is nothing left remarkable Beneath the visiting moon.3 These words have even more effect when heard in the theatre spoken by an ­eloquent actress. The Effect of Tragedy When the elements of traditional tragedy are combined, they appear to produce two contradictory reactions simultaneously. One is pes- simism: The heroes or heroines are “damned if they do and damned if they don’t,” and the world is a cruel, uncompromising place, a world of despair. And yet, in even the bleakest tragedy—whether Hamlet, Medea, Macbeth, or King Lear— there is affirmation. One source of this positive feeling is found in the drama itself. Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, and the French dramatist Jean Racine, although telling us that the world is in chaos and utterly lost, at the same time affirmed just the opposite by creating brilliant, carefully shaped works of art. There is another positive element, which has to do with the tragic heroes and heroines themselves. They meet their fate with such dignity and such determina- tion that they defy the gods. They say: “Come and get me; throw your worst at me. Whatever happens, I will not surrender my individuality or my dignity.” In Aeschylus’s play Prometheus Bound the title character—who is one of the ­earliest tragic heroes—says: “On me the tempest falls. It does not make me trem- ble.” In defeat, the men and women of tragedy triumph. The Greek philosopher Aristotle in The Poetics (c. 335 b.c.e.) attempted to describe the effect traditional tragedy had on the audience. He suggested that tragedy arouses pity and fear in the audience and that this genre purges the audience of those emotions. Spectators feel pity for the tragic hero caught in irretrievable circumstances and fear that if characters of noble stature can suffer falls so could they. The purga- tion of these emotions, however, again reflects a positive outcome of tragedy. As for the deeper meanings of individual tragedies, there is a vast literature on the subject, and each play has to be looked at and experienced in detail to obtain the full measure of its meaning. Certain tragedies seem to hold so much meaning, to contain so much—in substance and in echoes and reverberations— that one can spend a lifetime studying them. Modern Tragedy Tragedies of the modern period—that is, beginning in the late nineteenth ­century— do not have queens or kings as central figures, and they are written in prose rather than poetry. For these as well as more philosophical reasons, purists argue that modern tragedies are not true tragedies. In answer to this, it should be pointed out that today we have few kings or queens—either in mythology or, except in certain places like Great Britain, in real life. At the same time, we may ask: Do we not have characters today who can stand 3 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (1606), Act IV, Scene 5. 80 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright A MODERN TRAGIC FAMILY In Federico García Lorca’s play The House of Bernarda Alba, a widow who has grown to hate and distrust men keeps her daughters confined as virtual prisoners in their own home, preventing them from going out. In this production, directed by Elizabeth Huddle at the Madison Repertory Theatre, we see four of the daughters, with the mother in the center. Left to right, the performers are Jamie England, Monica Lyons, Elisabeth Adwin, Margaret Ingraham, and Diane Robinson. (©Zane Williams/Madison Repertory Theatre) as symbolic figures for important segments of society? Many would answer that we still do. In attempting to create modern tragedy, the question is not whether we view the human condition in the same way as the French did in the seventeenth century or the Greeks did in the fifth century b.c.e.—those two societies did not view life in the same way either—but whether our age allows for a tragic view on its own terms. The answer seems to be yes. Compared with either the eighteenth or the nineteenth century—ages of enlightenment, progress, and unbounded optimism— our age has its own tragic vision. Modern tragic dramatists probe the same depths and ask the same questions as did their predecessors: Why do men and women suffer? Why do violence and injustice exist? And perhaps most fundamental of all: What is the meaning of our lives? On this basis, many commentators would argue that writers like Ibsen, Strindberg, García Lorca, O’Neill, Williams, and Miller can lay claim to writing legitimate mod- ern tragedy. The ultimate test of a play is not whether it meets someone’s definition of tragedy but what effect it produces in the theatre and how successful it is in stand- ing up to continued scrutiny. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night takes as bleak a look at the human condition, with, at the same time, as compassionate a view of human striving and dignity as it seems possible to take in our day. HEROIC DRAMA Heroic drama Serious but The term heroic drama is not used as commonly as tragedy or comedy, but there is basically optimistic drama a wide range of plays for which heroic drama seems an appropriate description. We written in verse or elevated use the term specifically to indicate serious drama of any period that incorporates prose, with noble or heroic heroic or noble figures and other features of traditional tragedy—dialogue in verse, characters in extreme extreme situations, and the like—but differs from tragedy in having a happy ending, situations or unusual or in assuming a basically optimistic worldview even when the ending is sad. adventures. Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 81 photo essay Modern Domestic Drama Serious drama in America came of age in the mid-twentieth century, with plays by Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, and Lillian Hellman, among others. Though all four experimented with nonrealistic dramatic devices, much of their strongest work was realistic domestic drama. Included here are examples in photographs from recent productions. Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill with Paul Nicholls as the younger son, Edmund, Jessica Lange as Mary Tyrone, and Paul Rudd as James Tyrone, Jr. (©Rune Hellestad/Corbis Entertainment/ Getty Images) Gillian Anderson as Blanche Dubois and Vanessa Kirby as her sister Stella in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire in a production at the Young Vic in London, directed by Benedict Andrews. (©Robbie Jack/Corbis Entertainment/Getty Images) 82  Lee Aaron Rosen as Chris Keller, Michael Tisdale as George Deever, and Diane Davis as Ann Deever in All My Sons, by Arthur Miller, directed by David Esbjornson at the Huntington Theatre Company. (©T. Charles Erickson) Seth Numrich, left, and Danny Burstein in a recent Broadway revival of Golden Boy by Clifford Odets, directed by Bartlett Sher. (©Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux) 83  Several Greek plays ordinarily classified as tragedies are actually closer to heroic drama. In Sophocles’s Electra, for instance, Electra suffers grievously, but at the end of the play she and her brother Orestes triumph. Another example is The Cid, written by Pierre Corneille (1606–1684) in France. It has a hero who leads his men to victory in battle but who is not killed; in the end, he wins a duel against his rival. In the late seventeenth century in England, a form of drama that was called heroic drama, or sometimes heroic tragedy, was precisely the type about which we are speaking: a serious play with a happy ending for the hero or heroine. Many Asian plays—from India, China, and Japan—though deviating from the usual Western classifications by including, for example, a great deal of traditional dance and music, bear a close resemblance to heroic drama. Frequently, for exam- ple, a hero goes through a series of dangerous adventures, emerging victorious at the end. The vast majority of Asian dramas end happily. A second type of heroic drama involves the death of the hero or heroine, but the overall effect is not considered tragic. Several of the plays of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) follow this pattern. (Many of Goethe’s plays, along with those of his contemporaries in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, form a subdivision of heroic drama referred to as romantic drama. Romanticism Romanticism, a literary movement that took hold in Germany at the time and Nineteenth-century spread to France and throughout much of Europe, celebrated the spirit of hope, dramatic movement that personal freedom, and natural instincts.) imitated the episodic A number of plays in the modern period fall into the category of heroic structure of Shakespeare, drama. Saint Joan, by George Bernard Shaw, is a good example: Although Joan and thematically focused on is burned at the stake, her death is actually a form of triumph. As if that were the gulf between human beings’ spiritual aspirations not enough, Shaw provides an epilogue in which Joan appears alive again. and physical limitations. In the history of theatre, the plays we are discussing as heroic drama occupy a large and important niche, cutting across Asian and Western civilizations and across periods from the Greek golden age to the present. BOURGEOIS OR DOMESTIC DRAMA With the changes in society that resulted from the rise of the middle class and the shift from kings and queens to more democratic governments, we move from classic tragedy to modern tragedy. In the same way, during the past 150 years Bourgeois or domestic heroic drama has largely been replaced by bourgeois or domestic drama. ­Bourgeois drama Drama dealing refers to people of the middle or lower middle class rather than the aristocracy, with problems—particularly and domestic means that the plays often deal with problems of the family or the family problems—of middle- home rather than great affairs of state. In the Greek, Roman, and Renaissance and lower-class characters. periods, ordinary people served as main characters only in comedies; they rarely There are serious and comic appeared as heroes or heroines of serious plays. Beginning in the eighteenth domestic dramas. ­century, however, as society changed, there was a call for serious drama about men and women with whom members of the audience could identify and who were like themselves. In England in 1731, George Lillo (1693–1739) wrote The London Merchant, a story of a merchant’s apprentice who is led astray by a prostitute and betrays his good-hearted employer. This play, like others that came after it, dealt with recog- nizable people from the daily life of Britain, and audiences welcomed it. From these beginnings, bourgeois or domestic drama developed through the balance of the eighteenth century and the whole of the nineteenth, until it achieved a place of prominence in the new realistic works of Ibsen, Strindberg, and ­Chekhov. 84 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright DOMESTIC DRAMA OF EVERYDAY LIFE Domestic drama concerns itself with family problems: parents and children, husbands and wives, growing up, growing old. The characters in it are recognizable people, and it has long been a mainstay of modern drama. Shown here in a recent Broadway revival of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun are Denzel Washington, Sophie Okonedo, Latanya Richardson Jackson, Bryce Clyde Jenkins, and Anika Noni Rose. (©Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux) In the mid-twentieth century, three major American playwrights of domestic drama emerged: Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. O’Neill, in such plays as The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey into Night, probed the depth of his characters’ anguish as realistically as any dramatist of modern times. Miller, in The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, combined the tragic lives of its characters with political and moral investigations. Williams, the most lyrical of the three, in The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire, explored the limits of human sorrow and endurance. These three were followed in the decades to come by other important American playwrights such as Lorraine Hansberry, Edward Albee, August ­Wilson, and Paula Vogel. Problems with society, struggles within a family, dashed hopes, and renewed determination are typical characteristics of d­ omestic drama. When sufficiently p­ enetrating or profound, domestic drama achieves the level of modern tragedy. In one form or another, bourgeois or domestic drama has become the pre- dominant form of serious drama throughout Europe and the United States during the past hundred years. Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 85  MELODRAMA During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the most popular forms of Melodrama Dramatic theatre was melodrama. The word, which comes from Greek, means “music form made popular in the drama” or “song drama.” Its modern form was introduced by the French in the nineteenth century that late eighteenth century and applied to plays that had background music of the emphasized action and kind we hear in movies: ominous chords underscoring a scene of suspense and spectacular effects and also lyrical music underscoring a love scene. used music to underscore Among the effects for which melodrama generally strives is fright or horror. It the action; it had stock has been said that melodrama speaks to the paranoia in all of us: the fear that some- characters, usually with clearly defined villains and one is pursuing us or that disaster is about to overtake us. How often do we have a heroes. sense that others are ganging up on us or a premonition that we have a deadly disease? Melodrama brings these fears to life; we see people stalked or terrorized, or innocent victims tortured. Murder mysteries and detective stories are almost invariably melodramas because they stress suspense, danger, and close brushes with disaster. This type of melodrama usually ends in one of two ways: Either the victims are maimed or murdered (in which case our worst paranoid fears are confirmed) or, after a series SUSPENSION OF NATURAL LAWS IN COMEDY Frequently in various kinds of comedy, particularly in farce, our natural reaction to events is reordered to achieve a comic effect, and the audience accepts this. An excellent example is the play Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring, in which two elderly women, who appear to be helpless and harmless, actually murder a number of old men by giving them elderberry wine laced with poison. Because we have accepted the comic premise of the play, however, we do not condemn their acts, as we might in a melodrama, but rather become amused. Shown here (left to right) are Nathaniel Fuller (Mr. Witherspoon), Sally Wingert (Martha Brewster) and Kristine Nielsen (Abby Brewster) in a production at the Guthrie Theater directed by Joe Dowling. (©Michal Daniel) 86 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright of dangerous episodes, they are rescued (in which case the play is like a bad dream from which we awaken to realize that we are safe in bed and everything is all right). Probably the easiest way to understand melodrama is to look at film and televi- sion examples. Among the kinds of popular melodramas we are familiar with are westerns, science fiction films, horror films, superhero films and detective or spy films. All of these emphasize heroes and villains, other stock characters such as sidekicks and love interests, as well as spectacular events and special effects. But the key to the melodramatic form, on stage, and in film and television, is that good is almost always victorious over evil. These characteristics are also present in melodramatic plays. Still another form of melodrama argues a political or moral issue. Melodrama invariably shows us good characters against bad characters. Therefore, a play- wright who wants to make a strong political case will often write a melodrama in which the good characters represent his or her point of view. Traditional melodrama with its moral outlook, happy ending, stock characters, use of background music, and emphasis on spectacle developed in the nineteenth century. Still, a list of significant melodramas could range over most of theatre history and could include writers from Euripides through Shakespeare and his contemporaries to modern dramatists throughout Europe and the Americas because many types of serious drama, tragic and nontragic, frequently have strong melodramatic elements as well. Aside from those taking a basically serious point of view, there are two other fundamental approaches to dramatic material. One is comedy, with its many forms and variations; the other is a mixture of the serious and the comic, called tragicomedy. COMEDY People who create comedy are not necessarily more frivolous or less concerned Comedy In general, a with important matters than people who create serious works; they may be play that is light in tone, is extremely serious in their own way. Writers of comedy like Aristophanes, Molière, concerned with issues that and George Bernard Shaw cared passionately about human affairs and the ­problems point out the excesses and of men and women. But those with a comic view look at the world differently: folly of human behavior, has a happy ending, and is with a smile or a deep laugh or an arched eyebrow. Writers like these perceive designed to amuse. the follies and excesses of human behavior and develop a keen sense of the ridiculous, with the result that they show us things that make us laugh. It should also be noted that there are many kinds of laughter. They range all the way from mild amusement at a witty saying or a humorous situation to a belly laugh at some wild physical comedy to cruel, derisive laughter. Theatre, which reflects life and society, encompasses comedies that display a similar range, from light comedies to outrageous farces. Characteristics of Comedy If we cannot fully explain comedy, we can at least understand some of the prin- ciples that make it possible. Suspension of Natural Laws One characteristic of most comedy is a temporary suspension of the natural laws of probability, cause and effect, and logic. Actions do not have the consequences they do in real life. In comedy, when a haughty man walking down the street steps on a child’s skateboard and goes sprawling on the sidewalk, we do not fear for his safety or wonder if he has any bruises. The focus in comedy is on the man being tripped up and getting his comeuppance. In burlesque, a comic character can be hit on the backside with a fierce thwack, and we laugh, because we know that it does not hurt anything but his or Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 87  her pride. At one point in stage history a special stick consisting of two thin slats of wood held closely together was developed to make hitting someone more fright- Slapstick Type of ening. The stick was known as a slapstick, a name that came to describe all kinds comedy, or comic business, of raucous, physical, knockabout comedy. that relies on ridiculous Prime examples of the suspension of natural laws in comedy are found in physical activity—often film and television cartoons. In animated cartoons, characters are hurled through violent in nature—for its the air like missiles, are shot full of holes, and are flattened on the sidewalk when humor. they fall from buildings. But they always get up, with little more than a shake of the head. In the audience, there are no thoughts of real injury, of cuts or bruises, because the cause-and-effect chain of everyday life is not operating. Under these conditions, a significant accident, resulting in physical harm, itself can be viewed as comic. In the 2015 award-winning London backstage comedy The Play That Goes Wrong, created by members of the Mischief Theatre Company, a cast member of a disaster-prone fictional production is knocked unconscious but miraculously revives only to find that her replacement, a techni- cian, will not give up the role. We do not really think of the character as being rendered unconscious, and we have none of the feelings one usually has for an accident victim. The idea of suffering and harm has been suspended, and we are free to laugh at the irony and incongruity of the situation. The Comic Premise The suspension of natural laws in comedy makes possible Comic premise Idea or the development of a comic premise. The comic premise is an idea or concept that concept in a comedy that turns the accepted notion of things upside down and makes this upended notion the turns the accepted notion of basis of a play. The premise can provide thematic and structural unity and can serve things upside down. as a springboard for comic dialogue, comic characters, and comic situations. Aristophanes, the Greek satiric dramatist, was a master at developing a comic premise. In The Clouds, Aristophanes pictures Socrates as a man who can think only when perched in a basket suspended in midair. In The Birds, two ordinary men persuade a chorus of birds to build a city between heaven and earth. The birds comply, calling the place Cloudcuckoo Land, and the two men sprout wings to join them. In another play, Lysistrata, Aristophanes has the women of Greece agree to go on a sex strike to end a war: They will not make love to their husbands until the husbands stop fighting and sign a peace treaty with their opponents. Techniques of Comedy The suspension of natural laws and the establishment of a comic premise in com- Incongruity In comedy, edy involve exaggeration and incongruity. Incongruity usually refers to a charac- incongruity usually refers to ter’s inappropriate behavior or actions for a specific circumstance resulting in our a character’s inappropriate laughter. The contradictions that result from these show up in three areas—verbal behavior or actions for a humor, characterization, and comic situations. specific circumstance resulting in our laughter. Verbal Humor Verbal humor can be anything from a pun to the most sophisti- cated discourse. A pun—usually considered the simplest form of wit—is a humor- ous use of words with the same sound but different meanings. A man who says he is going to start a bakery if he can “raise the dough” is making a pun. Close to the pun is the malaprop—a word that sounds like the right word but actually means something quite different. The term comes from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in The Rivals by the English playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816). Mrs. Malaprop wants to impress everyone with her education and erudition but ends up doing just the opposite because she constantly misuses long 88 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright words. For example, she insists that her daughter is not “illegible” for marriage, meaning that her daughter is not “ineligible,” and when asked to explain a situation she says that someone else will provide the “perpendiculars” when she means the “particulars.” A sophisticated form of verbal humor is the epigram. Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), a man devoted to verbal humor, often turned accepted values upside down in his epigrams. “I can resist anything except temptation,” says one of his characters; and “A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies,” says another.4 Comedy of Character In comedy of character the discrepancy or incongruity lies in the way char- acters see themselves or pretend to be, as opposed to the way they actually are. A good example is a person who pretends to be a d­ octor—using obscure medicines, hypodermic needles, and Latin ­jargon— but who is actually a fake. Such a person is the chief character in Molière’s The Doctor in Spite of Himself. Another example of incongruity of character is Molière’s The Would-Be Gentleman, in which the title character, Monsieur Jourdain, a man of wealth, but without taste or refinement, is determined to learn courtly behavior. He hires a fencing master, a dancing master, and a teacher of literature to teach him these skills, but in every case Jourdain is ridiculed. Comedy of character is also a basic ingredi- ent of Italian commedia dell’arte and all forms of comedy where stock characters, stereotypes, and characters with dominant traits are emphasized. VERBAL HUMOR We can also find examples of comedies of One key element of comedy is verbal wit. No one was more the characters today in film and on television. The master of wit than playwright Oscar Wilde, whose epigrams and clever word play are still quoted today. Shown here is a scene popular TV show The Big Bang Theory focuses from his play The Importance of Being Earnest in a production on quirky scientists and much of the comedy is at the Aldwych Theatre in London featuring Maggie Smith and created by their unusual exaggerated behaviors Richard E. Grant. (©Robbie Jack/Corbis Entertainment/Getty Images) and relationships. Plot Complications Still another way the contradictory or the ludicrous manifests itself in comedy is in plot complications, including coincidences and mistaken identity. A time-honored comic plot is Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, based on The Menaechmi, a play of the late third century b.c.e. by the Roman writer Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254–184 b.c.e.). The Comedy of Errors in turn was the basis of a successful American musical comedy, The Boys from ­Syracuse, with songs by Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and Lorenz Hart (1895–1943). In The Comedy of Errors, identical twins and their identical twin servants were 4 Oscar Wilde, Lady Windemere’s Fan (1893) Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 89 PLOT COMPLICATIONS: A HALLMARK OF FARCE Frequently used devices of comedy include twists and turns in the plot, mistaken identity, unexpected developments, and ridiculous situations. Michael Frayn’s comedy Noises Off contains an abundance of these elements. The production shown here was directed by Lindsay Posner in London. (©Geraint Lewis) separated when young. As the play opens, however, both masters and both ­servants—unknown to one another—are in one place. The confusion among the twin brothers and the twin servants leads to an endless series of comic encounters. A classic scene of plot complication occurs in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, written in 1777. Joseph Surface, the main character in the play, is thought to be an upstanding man but is really a charlatan, whereas Charles, his brother, is mistakenly considered a reprobate. In a famous scene called the “screen scene,” both Lady Teazle, a married woman visiting Surface, and her husband, Sir Peter Teazle, are hidden, one behind a screen, one in a closet. When the honest Charles suddenly appears he discovers both of them, exposing their deceptions at a single moment. Forms of Comedy Farce A subclass of comedy with emphasis on Comedy takes various forms, depending on the dramatist’s intent and on the comic exaggerated plot techniques emphasized. complications and with few or no intellectual Farce Most plays discussed in the section above on plot complications are pretensions. farces. Farce thrives on exaggeration—not only plot complications but also broad 90 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright  PLAYING YOUR PART: EXPERIENCING THEATRE 1. What recent event in everyday life has been described as a “tragedy”? Would that event meet the traditional defini- tion of tragedy? Does it have the elements of traditional tragedy? 2. Is there a contemporary figure whose life you believe could be dramatized as a “modern tragedy”? Describe. 3. Have you seen a film or television show that could be categorized as “domestic drama”? What are its characteristics that lead you to that categorization? 4. Have you seen a recent film that you would categorize as a “melodrama”? What are its characteristics that lead you to that categorization? 5. Have you seen films or television shows that could be categorized as farce, burlesque, satire, domestic comedy, comedy of manners, comedy of characters? 6. Can you describe any current events that might be dramatized as tragicomedy? Why? physical humor and stereotyped characters. It has no intellectual pretensions but aims rather at entertainment and provoking laughter. In addition to excessive plot complications, its humor results from ridiculous situations as well as pratfalls and horseplay, not on the verbal wit found in more intellectual forms of comedy. Mock violence, rapid movement, and accelerating pace are hallmarks of farce. Marriage and sex are the objects of fun in bedroom farce, but farce can also poke fun at medicine, law, and business. Burlesque Burlesque also relies on knockabout physical humor, as well as gross Burlesque A ludicrous, exaggerations and, occasionally, vulgarity. Historically, burlesque was a ludicrous comic imitation of a imitation of other forms of drama or of an individual play. A recent example is dramatic form, play, piece the takeoff of the hit musical Hamilton, entitled Spamilton. In the United States, of literature, or other the term burlesque came to describe a type of variety show featuring low comedy popular entertainment. skits and attractive women. Satire A form related to traditional burlesque, but with more intellectual and moral or political content, is satire. Satire uses wit, irony, and exaggeration to Satire Comic form, using attack or expose evil and foolishness. Satire can attack specific figures; for exam- irony and exaggeration, to ple, the continuously updated and revised revue Forbidden Broadway makes fun attack and expose folly and of the more flamboyant or excessive stars as well as plots and story lines of vice. Broadway musicals. It can also be more inclusive, as in the case of Molière’s Tartuffe, which ridicules religious hypocrisy generally. Domestic Comedy The comic equivalent of domestic or bourgeois drama is domestic comedy. Usually dealing with family situations, it is found most ­frequently today in television situation comedies—often called sitcoms—which feature members of a family or residents of a neighborhood caught in a series of complicated but amusing situations. Television shows such as The Simpsons, Modern Family and Black-ish are examples. This type of comedy was once a staple of theatre and can still be found onstage in the frequently revived plays by Neil Simon (b. 1927). Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 91 photo essay Forms of Comedy Comedy takes a number of forms, depending on whether the emphasis is on verbal wit, plot complications, or the characters’ eccentricities. It can range all the way from intellectual comedy, to high comedy (dealing with the upper classes), to domestic comedy (similar to sitcoms on TV), to slapstick farce. Shown here is a variety of types of comedy. Shown here is Owain Arthur as Francis Henshall in One Man, Two Guvnors, a farce by Richard Bean after Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters, in a production directed by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre, London. (©Donald Cooper/ PhotoStage) Shown here are David Shiner, left, and Bill Irwin performing in Old Hats, a slapstick comedy they created at the Pershing Square Signature Center, directed by Tina Landau. (©Sara Krulwich/The New York Times/Redux) 92 COMEDY OF MANNERS Comedy of manners usually deals with the upper class in a given society. It stresses verbal humor, repartee, and irony. The precursors of modern comedy of manners were the Restoration comedies popular in London in the late seventeenth century. In the nineteenth century, Oscar Wilde was a master of comedy of manners, and in the twentieth century it was Noël Coward. One of Coward’s best-known plays is Private Lives, about two upper-class couples whose marriages become comically entangled. Seen here in a production at the Guthrie Theater are Tracey Maloney (Sibyl), Kris L. Nelson (Victor), Stephen Pelinski (Elyot), and Veanne Cox (Amanda). (©Michal Daniel) Comedy of Manners Comedy of manners is concerned with pointing up the Comedy of manners Form foibles and peculiarities of the upper classes. Against a cultivated, sophisticated of comic drama that became background, it uses verbal wit to depict the cleverness and expose the social popular in the English Restoration, that is set within pretensions of its characters. Rather than horseplay, it stresses witty phrases. In sophisticated society, while comedy of manners, pointed barbs are always at a premium. In England a line poking fun at its characters’ of comedies of manners runs from William Wycherley, William Congreve, and social pretensions, usually Oliver Goldsmith (1730–1774) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to through verbal wit. Oscar Wilde in the nineteenth century and Noël Coward (1899–1973) in the twentieth. Comedy of ideas Comedy of Ideas Many of George Bernard Shaw’s plays could be put under a A comedy in which the humor is based on intellectual and special heading, comedy of ideas, because Shaw used comic techniques to debate verbal aspects of comedy intellectual propositions and to further his own moral and social point of view. rather than physical comedy Though witty and amusing, Shaw’s plays frequently include provocative discus- or comedy of character. A sions of controversial social issues. Mrs. Warren’s Profession, for example, drama whose emphasis is on about a woman who runs a house of prostitution, deals with hypocrisy in society the clash of ideas, as and Arms and the Man is not only an amusing story of a pompous soldier but exemplified in the plays of also a treatise on war and heroism. George Bernard Shaw. Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 93  In all its forms, comedy remains a way of looking at the world in which basic values are asserted but natural laws are suspended in order to underline human follies and foolishness—sometimes with a rueful look, sometimes with a wry smile, and sometimes with an uproarious laugh. TRAGICOMEDY Tragicomedy During the In twentieth-century theatre a new genre came to the forefront—tragicomedy. Renaissance, a play having In this section, we examine this form that has proved so important in the mod- tragic themes and noble ern period. characters but a happy ending; today, a play in which serious and comic What Is Tragicomedy? elements are integrated. Many plays of this type In the past, comedy has usually been set in opposition to tragedy or serious drama: present a comic or ironic Serious drama is sad, comedy is funny; serious drama makes people cry, comedy treatment of a serious makes them laugh; serious drama arouses anger, comedy brings a smile. True, theme. the comic view of life differs from the serious view, but the two are not always as clearly separated as this polarity suggests. Many comic dramatists are serious people; “I laugh to keep from crying” applies to many comic writers as well as to certain clowns and comedians. A great deal of serious drama contains comic elements. Shakespeare, for instance, included comic characters in several of his serious plays. The drunken porter in Macbeth, the gravedigger in Hamlet, and Falstaff in Henry IV, Part 1 are examples. In medieval plays, comic scenes are interpolated in the basically religious subject matter. One of the best-known of all medieval plays, The Second Shepherds’ Play, concerns the visit of the shepherds to the manger of the newborn Christ child. While they stop in a field to spend the night, Mak, a comic character, steals a sheep and takes it to his house, where he and his wife pretend that it is their baby. When the shepherds discover what Mak has done, they toss him in a blanket, and after this horseplay the serious part of the story resumes. The alternation of serious and comic elements is a practice of long standing, particularly in episodic plays; but tragicomedy does not refer to plays that shift from serious to comic and back again. It is a view in which one eye looks through a comic lens and the other through a serious lens; and the two points of view are so intermingled as to be one, like food that tastes sweet and sour at the same time. In addition to his basically serious plays and his basically comic plays, Shakespeare wrote others that seem to be a combination of tragedy and comedy, such as Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well. Because they do not fit neatly into one category or the other, these plays have proved troublesome to critics—so troublesome that they have been officially dubbed problem plays. The “problem,” however, arises largely because of difficulty in accepting the tragicomic point of view, for these plays have many of the attributes of the fusion of the tragic and the comic. A sense of comedy pervades these plays, the idea that all will end well and that much of what happens is ludicrous or ridiculous; at the same time, the serious effects of a character’s actions are not dismissed. Unlike true comedy, in which a fall on the sidewalk or a temporary danger has no serious consequences, these plays contain actions that appear quite serious. And so we have tragicomedy. 94 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright COMBINING TRAGEDY AND COMEDY Tragicomedy has become more and more prominent in the modern period, and has taken its place alongside traditional tragedy, comedy, and other genres as a major form of our time. In several of Shakespeare’s so-called problem plays, comic and serious elements are intermixed in the manner of contemporary tragicomedy. A good example is All’s Well That Ends Well, which features a strange, almost bizarre, mixture of fairy-tale elements with cynical realism. Shown here is James Garnon as Parolles in a London production at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, directed by John Dove. (©Geraint Lewis) Modern Tragicomedy In the modern period—during the past hundred years or so—tragicomedy has become the primary approach of many of the best playwrights. As suggested in the chapter “The Audience,” these writers are not creating in a vacuum; they are part of the world in which they live, and ours is an age that has adopted a tragi- comic viewpoint more extensively than most previous ages. As if to keynote this attitude and set the tone, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) in 1842 wrote: “Existence itself, the act of existence, is a striving and is both pathetic and comic in the same degree.”5 The plays of Anton Chekhov, written at the turn of the twentieth century, reflect the spirit described by Kierkegaard. Chekhov called two of his major plays comedies; but Stanislavski, who directed them, called them tragedies—an indica- tion of the confusion arising from Chekhov’s mixture of the serious and the comic. 5 Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 2002, p. 354. Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 95  COMEDIES OF MENACE Comedies range widely, from the pure entertainment of farce and light comedy to more substantive and probing comedies with a strong serious component. The playwright Harold Pinter calls many of his plays comedies of menace, meaning that they can provoke laughter but also have a deeper, more disturbing, sometimes frightening element. One of Pinter’s best- known plays exemplifying this is The Birthday Party. Shown here are Timothy West as Goldberg and Nigel Terry as McCann in a production of the play at the Piccadilly Theatre in London. (©PA Images/Alamy Stock Photo) An example of Chekhov’s approach is a scene at the end of the third act of Uncle Vanya (1899). The lives of Vanya and his niece, Sonya, have been ruined by Sonya’s father, a professor. At the moment where Sonya tells her father how cruel and thoughtless he is, Vanya comes in, waving a pistol in the air, and shoots twice at the professor, but misses both times. There is some doubt that Vanya honestly means to kill the professor and the scene itself is both tragic and comic: The two elements are inextricably joined together. Theatre of the absurd (discussed below) is an example of modern tragicomedy. It probes deeply into human problems and casts a cold eye on the world, and yet it is also imbued with a comic spirit. The plays of Harold Pinter (1930–2008), a writer associated with theatre of the absurd, have been called comedies of menace, a phrase suggesting the idea of a theatre simultaneously terrifying and entertaining. Theatre of the absurd Twentieth century plays THEATRE OF THE ABSURD expressing the dramatists’ sense of absurdity and After World War II, a new type of theatre emerged in Europe and the United futility of human existence States, which the critic Martin Esslin called theatre of the absurd. Although the through the dramatic dramatists whose work falls into this category do not write in identical styles and techniques they employ. are not really a “school” of writers, they do have enough in common to be 96 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright THEATRE OF THE ABSURD Non sequitur, nonsensical language, existential characters, ridiculous situations—these are hallmarks of theatre of the absurd, which can also be viewed as a type of tragicomedy. One example is Eugene Ionesco’s Exit the King. Shown here, left to right, are Lauren Ambrose (as Queen Marie), Geoffrey Rush (King Berenger), William Sadler (the Doctor, in the background), and Susan Sarandon (Queen Marguerite, the King’s wife) in a 2009 Broadway production adapted and directed by Neil Armfield. (©Joan Marcus) c­ onsidered together. Esslin took the name for this form of theatre from a quotation in The Myth of Sisyphus by the French writer, dramatist, and philosopher Albert Camus (1913–1960). In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus says that in the modern age there is a separation between “man and his life, the actor and his setting,” and that this separation “constitutes the feeling of Absurdity.”6 Plays falling into the category of absurdism convey humanity’s sense of alien- ation and its loss of bearings in an illogical, unjust, and ridiculous world. Although serious, this viewpoint is generally depicted in plays with considerable humor; an ironic note runs through much of theatre of the absurd. A prime example of theatre of the absurd is Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In this play Beckett has given us one of the most telling expressions of loneliness and futility ever written: two tramps on a barren plain waiting every day for a 6 Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Gallimard, Paris, 1942, p. 18. Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 97 TRAGICOMEDY: FUNNY AND SAD AT THE SAME TIME Several plays by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov could be described as tragicomedies containing elements of both comedy and tragedy, mixed together in a profound way. The scene here is from Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with June Watson as Marina, Ken Stott as Vanya, Paul Freeman as Serebryakov and Anna Friel as Yelena. Directed by Lindsay Posner, the production was at the Vaudeville Theatre in London. (©Robbie Jack/Corbis Entertainment/Getty Images) supreme being called “Godot,” who they think will come but who never does. At the same time, they themselves are comic. They wear baggy pants like bur- lesque comedians, and engage in any number of vaudeville routines. Also, the characters frequently say one thing and do just the opposite. One says to the other, “Well, shall we go?” and the other says, “Yes, let’s go.” But having said this, they don’t move. Absurdist plays suggest the idea of absurdity both in what they say—that is, their content—and in the way they say it, their form. Their structure, therefore, is a departure from dramatic structures of the past. Absurdist Plots: Illogicality Traditional plots in drama proceed in a logical way from a beginning through the development of the plot to a conclusion, an arrangement that suggests an ordered universe. In contrast, many absurdist plays not only proclaim absurdity but also embody it. 98 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright  PLAYING YOUR PART: THINKING ABOUT THEATRE 1. A play by Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, Tennessee Williams, Lorraine Hansberry, or August Wilson might be set in a time fifty years ago or 100 years ago. What do you think it is about these dramas that allow audience members in the twenty-first century to identify strongly with the characters and the situations in the play? 2. Which kind of play do you prefer: a classic tragedy, a serious contemporary drama, a knockabout farce, a comedy, a musical? Can you explain why you prefer one type over the others? 3. Do you favor a play with a strong story line, a tight plot, and unexpected twists and turns? Or do you prefer a looser play that reflects the randomness of everyday life? What do you think attracts you to these characteristics? An example is The Bald Soprano by Eugène Ionesco. The very title of the play turns out to be nonsense; a bald soprano is mentioned once in the play, but with no explanation, and it is clear that the bald soprano has nothing whatever to do with the play as a whole. The absurdity of the piece is manifest the moment the curtain goes up. A typical English couple are sitting in a living room when the clock on the mantle strikes seventeen times; the wife’s first words are, “There, it’s nine o’clock.” Absurdist Language: Nonsense and Non Sequitur Events and characters are frequently illogical in theatre of the absurd, and so too is language. Non sequitur is a Latin term meaning “it does not follow”; it implies that something does not follow from what has gone before, and it perfectly describes the method of theatre of the absurd. Sentences do not follow in sequence, and words do not mean what we expect them to mean. An example of the irrationality or debasement of language is found in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The character of Lucky does not speak for most of his time onstage, but at the end of the first act he delivers a long speech consisting of incoherent religious and legalistic jargon. The opening lines offer a small sample: Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time with- out extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell.... 7 Numerous examples of such language appear not only in Ionesco’s and Beckett’s plays but in plays written by many other absurdist writers. Absurdist Characters: Existential Beings A significant feature of absurdist plays is the handling of characters. Not only is there an element of the ridiculous in the characters’ actions, but they frequently exemplify an existential point of view. In theatre, existentialism suggests that 7 From Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Copyright 1954 by Grove Press; renewed copyright 1982 by Samuel Beckett. Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 99  IN FOCUS: MANY ADDITIONAL FORMS AND THE DEBATE OVER CATEGORIZATION As can be seen in our discussions of tragicomedy and and surrealism trying to mimic the dream and other theatre of the absurd, dramas often defy categorization. subconscious states. Plays frequently mix genres and styles. We have noted The German playwright Bertolt Brecht, between the how Shakespeare wrote plays that did not clearly fit two World Wars and shortly after World War II, created into either tragedy or comedy and some earlier critics what he called “epic” theatre, in which audience mem- referred to them as “problem” plays. bers were constantly reminded they were in the theatre. In the late twentieth century, theorists who are Songs broke up the action of his plays and underscored ­referred to as postmodernists, and whose concepts we his political messages, and narrators were used to com- will discuss more fully later, questioned the validity of ment on the sociopolitical meaning of the dramatic categorizing dramas by genre. They argued that such action. categorization led to a hierarchy that was built on In the past half-century, many playwrights have ­sociopolitical and aesthetic biases. Why should tragedy written documentary plays based on actual historic or comedy be privileged over melodrama or domestic events, using testimonies and archival documents as drama? Does privileging traditional tragedy over mod- their dramatic material. Since the 1960s, moreover, ern tragedy have sociopolitical (and in many cases, there have been experimental companies that staged gender) implications? Can we really distinguish communally created performance pieces that engaged ­between any of these genres and do such broad catego- audiences in a variety of ways. As we shall see in ries even make sense? Do audiences or authors differ- the chapter “Today’s Diverse Global Theatre,” contem- entiate in this fashion or does each playwright create a porary multicultural, feminist, LGBTQ, and global unique work and does each audience member have his ­playwrights, as well as solo performance artists, have or her own unique reaction to that work? Is there really experimented with a multitude of styles and forms. a distinction between more popular theatrical forms And, of course, over the past 100 years, there have and entertainments and so-called “high” art? been many popular theatre forms. One example is We can clearly see the problem of trying to catego- ­musical theatre (discussed more fully in the chapter rize drama since the end of the nineteenth century. “The Modern Theatre Emerges”), which incorporates Throughout this time period there have been many plot (referred to as the book of a musical), songs, and avant-garde and popular theatrical forms that do not dance to tell a story. There are also many subcategories neatly fit into any of the categories discussed in this of musical theatre. chapter. While we will discuss the development of these and Expressionism and surrealism, forms that devel- other forms more fully in the final two chapters of our oped early in the twentieth century, tried to capture the text, the key question that these examples raise is: can inner workings of the human mind: expressionism pre- we actually categorize plays and are there theatre works senting drama from the point of view of the protagonist that defy categorization? characters have no personal history and therefore no specific causes for their actions. The two main characters in Waiting for Godot, for example, are devoid of biography and personal motivation; we know nothing of their family life or their occupations. They meet every day at a crossroads to wait for Godot, but how long they have been coming there, or what they do when they are not there, remains a mystery. In addition to the plays of the absurdists, other modern plays also incor- porate the tragicomic spirit. In The Visit, by Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990), 100 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright a Swiss dramatist, a wealthy woman returns to her birthplace, a small, poverty- stricken village. She offers a huge sum of money to the village on the condition that the citizens murder a storekeeper who wronged her when she was young. The townspeople express horror at the idea, but at the same time they begin buying expensive items on credit—some from the man’s own store. There is a comic quality to these scenes, but the conclusion is not funny, for the man is eventually murdered by his greedy neighbors. In tragicomedy, a smile is frequently cynical, a chuckle may be tinged with a threat, and laughter is sometimes bitter. In the past, the attitude that produced these combinations was the exception rather than the rule. In our day, it seems far more prevalent, not to say relevant. As a result, tragicomedy has taken its place as a major form alongside the more traditional approaches. SUMMARY 1. Tragedy attempts to ask very basic questions about human existence: Why do men and women suffer? Is there justice in the world? What are the limits of human endur- ance and achievement? Tragedy presupposes an indifferent and sometimes malevo- lent universe in which the innocent suffer and there is inexplicable cruelty. It also assumes that certain men and women will confront and defy fate, even if they are overcome in the process. 2. Tragedy can be classified as traditional or modern. In traditional tragedy the chief characters are persons of stature—kings, queens, and the nobility. The central figure is caught in a series of tragic circumstances, which are irretrievable. The hero or heroine is willing to fight and die for a cause. The language of the play is verse. 3. Modern tragedy involves ordinary people rather than the nobility, and it is generally written in prose rather than verse. In this modern form, the deeper meanings of tragedy are explored by nonverbal elements and by the cumulative or overall effect of events as well as by verbal means. 4. There are several kinds of nontragic serious plays, the most notable being heroic drama, bourgeois or domestic drama, and melodrama. 5. Heroic drama has many of the same elements as traditional tragedy—it frequently deals with highborn characters and is often in verse. In contrast to tragedy, however, it has a happy ending or an ending in which the death of the main character is con- sidered a triumph, not a defeat. 6. Bourgeois or domestic drama deals with ordinary people, always seriously but not always tragically. It stresses the problems of the middle and lower classes and became a particularly prominent form in the twentieth century. 7. Melodrama features exaggerated characters and events arranged to create horror or suspense or to present a didactic argument for some political, moral, or social point of view. 8. Comedy takes a different approach from serious forms of drama. It sees the humor and incongruity in people and situations. Comic dramatists accept a social and moral order and suspend natural laws (a man falls flat on his face but does not really hurt himself). Chapter 4 Theatrical Genres 101  9. Comedy is developed by means of several techniques. Verbal humor turns words upside down and creates puns, malapropisms, and inversions of meaning. Comedy of character creates men and women who take extreme positions, make fools of themselves, or contradict themselves. Plot complications create mistaken identity, coincidences, and people who turn up unexpectedly in the wrong house or the wrong bedroom. There are also physical aspects to comedy: slapstick and horseplay. 10. From these techniques, the dramatist fashions various kinds of comedy. For instance, depending on the degree of exaggeration, a comedy can be farce or comedy of ­manners; farce features strong physical humor, whereas comedy of manners relies more on verbal wit. 11. Another type of comedy is domestic comedy, which deals with ordinary people in familiar situations. 12. Depending on its intent, comedy can be designed to entertain, as with farce or ­burlesque; or to correct vices, in which case it becomes satire. Many of Shaw’s plays represent comedy of ideas. 13. Serious and comic elements can be mixed in theatre. Many tragedies have comic relief—humorous scenes and characters interspersed in serious material. 14. Authentic tragicomedy fuses, or synthesizes, two elements—one serious, the other comic. We laugh and cry at the same time. Chekhov, Beckett, Dürrenmatt, and writ- ers of theatre of the absurd use tragicomedy in their plays. Some commentators feel that this is the form most truly characteristic of our time. Design elements: Playing Your Part box (theatre seats): ©McGraw-Hill Education; In Focus box (spotlight): ©d_gas/Getty Images 102 Part 2 Creating Theatre: The Playwright