#2 PURPOSE: Melodrama & Variety Entertainment
Think: The Big Questions
Is the primary purpose of theatre to entertain, or is it "to delight and Instruct" (Horace) or just instruct (Tertulian)?
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Should theatre provide an escape from the negatives of reality and reaffirm the belief that, in the end, "virtue will be rewarded and vice punished"?
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Can humanity be broken down into "good guys" and "bad guys"? If so, are we born that way or do we become so?
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Introduce
QUIZ
“Nobody ever lost a dollar
by underestimating the taste
of the American public.”
― P.T. Barnum (19th C Showman)
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"The dramatist's function is
(1) to earn a living for his family and himself and
(2) to try to entertain people for a few hours."
—Lee Adams (Modern Lyricist)
Visualize
Multiple Bill
Nautical Melodrama
Vaudeville
Know: Vocabulary
African Grove Theatre
Astor Place Riots
blackface
Boucicault
burlesque
caricature
claque
cyclorama
diorama
Edwin Forrest
gas table
Ira Aldridge
limelight
melodrama
minstrelsy
panorama
Pixerecourt
poetic justice
Puritans
sensation scenes
tableaux
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
variety entertainment
vaudeville
villain
Watch: Historical Context
QUIZ
North America Gets A Theatre...Riot
It's lights up in America! This week, we're headed to North America. We'll look at Native American storytelling traditions, the theater that Europeans brought along starting in the 17th century, and how theater developed before and after the American Revolutionary War. Also, a terrible Macbeth rivalry which culminates in a full blown theater riot.
The Rise of Melodrama
At the turn of the 18th century, audience were ready to go over the top, and get some really, really dramatic theater in their lives. Like, a dog dueling a man type of dramatic. In London, only two theaters were licensed, but entertainment entrepreneurs figured out that musical entertainments weren't subject to the same restrictions. So, incidental music was invented, and the melodrama was born. And then switched with another infant. And later tied to train tracks, but rescued at the last minute. And so forth.
Race Melodrama & Minstrel Shows​
We’re continuing our discussion of nineteenth-century American theater with a look at some upsetting parts of the US's theatrical past. In the nineteenth century, race and racism contributed to a unique and troubling performance culture, which helped create and spread racist stereotypes that are still with us today. And just—to be super clear—the stuff we’re talking about in this episode is tough. The images are upsetting, and much of the language is fraught, to put it lightly. So, just an up-front content warning, so you know what’s coming up.
Variety Entertainment
Tableaux Vivant
Vaudeville
Sample Plays
Uncle Tom's Cabin
by George Aiken
American (1852)
Melodrama
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The Octoroon
by Dion Boucicault
Irish (1859)
Melodrama
An Octoroon
by Brandon Jacob-Jenkins
American (2015)
Reinvention
Compare: Architecture, Design & Technology
Mechanical Theatre
An 18th-century mechanical theatre was a technology of tricks and devices that changed scenes almost miraculously. Visitors to the exhibition will be able to watch regular performances of a galleon cast adrift in a storm, with the odd mermaid.
Lighting Museum​
This clip is a brief overview of the Compulite lighting museum in Israel. It even goes over a few of the ways stages were lit for the past few hundred years.
Limelight​
On Nov. 9, 1825, Scottish inventor Thomas Drummond successfully tested a white-hot incandescent illumination that revolutionized theatre.
(Re)Interpret: An Octoroon
Playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has adapted The Octoroon into An Octoroon...Jacobs-Jenkins’ version keeps many of the original characters, much of the dialogue, and the entire plot of The Octoroon. In fact most of his take on the story is embodied in the actors and staging instead of the text: Whereas in the 1859 production, the black characters were played by white actors in blackface, in An Octoroon, a black actor plays both the white hero, George, and white villain, M’Closky, in white face; a white actor plays the Native American character, Wahnotee, in red face; and a “racially ambiguous ” actor who looks Native American plays two black characters, Pete and Paul, in blackface.
We enter Boucicault’s world, where George; M’Closky; Pete; Paul; the white woman, Dora; and the octoroon, Zoe, speak much of Boucicault’s text with the same melodramatic flair one can imagine actors in 1859 employing, but without most of the spectacle… Jacobs-Jenkins keeps reminding his audience that race, and therefore “the race problem in America,” is not just a matter of DNA (as it is for the octoroon), but rather a matter of DNA and history, heritage, and performance. All the time that has passed since 1859 serves only to make this mix more complicated. Today, Jacobs-Jenkins seems to say, race is less a matter of what we can see and more a question of how we ask to be seen.
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Blackface
