#6 Expressionism, Theatre of Cruelty & Absurdism
Watch (for Tuesday's Quiz)
No assigned reading this week.
Our theater journey takes us into the heart of expressionism today, as playwrights in the late 19th and early 20th centuries explored the limits of human beings' tolerance for a mechanized, industrial world. Spoiler alert: those playwrights didn't think humans fared very well in the industrialized world. They EXPRESSED that concern about modernity through some pretty dark plays, with pretty dark sets, and pretty dark content.
I don't mean it mean, but today we're going to be cruel. It's the fun-loving Theater of Cruelty, which was pioneered by the genius Antonin Artaud in France during the inter-war period in twentieth century. The Theater of Cruelty was meant to force an audience into looking at the ridiculous illusions of their bourgeois lives. Is it entertaining? Not always. Was it hugely influential? Absolutely.
Get ready to get weird. Mike Rugnetta teaches you about the Theater of the Absurd, a 1950s theatrical reaction to the dire world events of the 1940s. You'll learn about Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and the theatrical movement that left us all Waiting for Godot.
Vocabulary
Absurdism
Adolphe Appia
Antonin Artaud
The Bald Soprano
Samuel Beckett
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Albert Camus
catharsis
Expressionism
Gordon Craig
Existentialism
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Jean Genet
The Grand Guignol
The Hairy Ape
Eugene Ionesco
Robert Edmund Jones
Edwin Piscator
Machinal
The Maids
mis-en-scene
The Myth of Sisyphus
No Exit
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Jean Paul Sartre
The Spurt of Blood
The Theatre and Its Double
Sophie Treadwell
Spring's Awakening
Theatre of Cruelty
ubermarionettes
visceral appeal
Waiting for Godot
Frank Wedekind
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Lecture Slides
Artaud & Theatre of Cruelty (To Drain Abscesses Collectively)
THEATRE OR CRUELTY. Antonin Artaud’s label for the type of performance he advocated to force audiences to confront the violent impulses suppressed within their unconscious minds. Although he acknowledged that such confrontations might be cruel, Artaud thought them necessary to overcome violence and divisive-ness if the theatre is to fulfill its goal of “draining abscesses collectively.” Little heeded during his life-time, Artaud later exerted major influence on theat-rical practice, especially during the 1960s.
REPRESENTATIVE PLAYS
Antonin Artaud's The Cenci (1935)
Antonin Artaud's Sprut of Blood (1925)
Sarah Kane's Blasted (1995)
Expressionism (Perception Precedes Reality)
EXPRESSIONISM. An artistic movement that flourished, especially in Germany, from around 1910 to about 1924. Believing that the industrial age had turned human beings into machine-like creatures, expressionism sought to undermine materialist values and create “the new man,” who would reshape the world in accordance with the needs of the human spirit. Expressionist drama made extensive use of distortion and grotesque imagery to portray the present human condition. Expressionism found its way into American drama, as in O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape.
REPRESENTATIVE PLAYS
Frank Wedekind's Spring's Awakening (1891/1906)
Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape (1922)
Sophie Treadwell's Machinal (1928)
Absurdism (The Meaningfulness of Meaninglessness)
ABSURDISM. A term used to describe certain plays of the post–World War II period. The writers of these plays believed that the human condition is absurd because the desire for clarity and order is met only by the irrationality of the universe, thus making rational or meaningful choice impossible. Absurdist plays abandoned the logic of cause-to-effect relationships for associational patterns reflecting the illogical nature of the human situation. Two of the most prominent absurdist playwrights were Beckett and Ionesco.
REPRESENTATIVE PLAYS
Eugene Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950)
Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs (1952)
Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953)