Crash Course Theater

THE BIRTH of MODERN THEATRE

Study Guide

1. Let’s start with , who you may know as the author of “Les Miserables.”
2. In 1827, he wrote “ ,” which we now mostly know because of its
awesome Preface in which Hugo argues that if you really wanna show how grotesque,
sublime, and weird life is, play by the neoclassical rules.
3. But too much nature?
“Everyone knows that color and light are lost in a simple reflection,” Hugo writes.
“The drama, therefore, must be a concentrating mirror, which, instead of weakening,

concentrates and condenses the colored rays, which makes of a mere gleam a light, and of a light
a flame.”

4. He these natural-but-not-too-natural ideas in his play “Hernani,” which

premiered in 1830.
5. Following Hugo, a few people half-heartedly attempted to make the theater
.
Mostly they did this by moving popular theater away from grandiose, avalanche-heavy melodrama ... towards

intimate, sofa-heavy melodrama.

6. This form was by Eugene Scribe in the pièce bien faite, or the
well-made play…
7. Scribe, who wrote nearly , definitely wasn’t interested in
making the theater all that life like.
He wrote: “You go to theater, not for instruction or correction, but for relaxation and
amusement. Now what amuses you most is not truth, but fiction… the extraordinary, the
romantic, that is what charms you, that is what one is eager to offer you.”

8. Scribe was , and so were his dramaturgical roll crew, Georges Feydeau
and Victorien Sardou.
9. But other writers were starting to wonder if the well-made play could be made even better
by being brought more in line with .
10. The term “ ” started popping up in France in the 1850s.
Theorists called for realistic situations, realistic characters, and
realistic dialogue. Even grammatically incorrect dialogue!
11. And even though realism was supposed to be a move away from the sensationalism and
moralism of melodrama—…, .
12. The realistic movement with a whole bunch of scientific
discoveries and publications, notably Charles Darwin’s “ .”

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 Crash Course Theater
THE BIRTH of MODERN THEATRE
Study Guide
13. In theater, the big-time early adopter was Emile Zola…
Instead of the well-made play formula, Zola said that theater should use other formulas: scientific
formulas! This was naturalism.

14. Theater, Zola thought, should be a , with its

experiments based …on the inner conflicts of a group of characters.
15. Realism, like melodrama, is one of those genres that’s . In
plays, in movies, on TV shows.
Realism and naturalism promise us art that looks a lot like life, but it turns out that life isn’t always so
easy to stage. It’s long; a lot of it is boring; and people normally get really miffed when you call
intermission in the middle of it.

16. This means that realistic art has to less-than-exactingly-realistic

conventions.
17. Meet Henrik Ibsen and his mutton chops. Ibsen was in the port town of Skien.
18. …After writing "Emperor and Galilean", which Ibsen and only Ibsen considers his best
play, something happened. Ibsen decided that prose is for reality, verse for visions,
and he started writing plays about bourgeois people in trouble…
First Ibsen wrote "The Pillars of Society" and then "A Doll's House", "Ghosts", and
"An Enemy of the People". "People demand reality," Ibsen wrote, "No more, no less,"

19. It's hard to describe how these plays were to

19th Century Theater.

20. … Ibsen held , complicated multi-layered character, paramount.

21. But here's the real : Strindberg plays with discoveries that
comfortable ideas about marriage and children.
22. Ibsen's plays end by revealing the bourgeois family .
These plays don't complacently transmit received ideas. They argue that the ideas themselves
are the problem.

23. Strindberg was born in 1849 to a mother who had been a servant. After a brief stint as a
pharmacist's assistant…he studied modern languages and wrote a bunch

while working as a librarian.

24. Why did he hate Ibsen so much? Well, he thought that Ibsen had a couple
of ineffectual characters after him.

25. Strindberg's first artistic successes were of naturalistic plays: "The

Father", "Miss Julie", and "The Creditors".

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Study Guide

26. Strindberg had huge borderline psychotic issues .

Like Ibsen and the French naturalists, Strindberg believed that character was way more
important than plot and he spent a lot of time exploring the psychological aspects of his
characters, especially as they related to…Heredity and Environment.

27. After some periods of occultism and insanity … Strindberg like Ibsen made a

towards symbolism.
28. These two
guys, who hated each other, pretty much or anticipated
most of the major forms of 19th century drama…
29. Early Russian drama the early years of theater in
France, Germany, or Italy.

Fun fact, for a country so state-controlled and censorship-heavy, realism came to

Russia pretty early. Examples include Ivan Turgenev's melancholy 1950s comedy, "A
Month in the Country", about affairs on a rural estate and Alexander Ostrowsky's
middle class comedies and dramas. AF Posemsky's "A Bitter Fate" even followed
Zola's naturalistic precepts a decade before Zola wrote them.

30. Into this world arrived Anton Chekhov, Russia's greatest and a man
who really knew his way around a samovar.

31. …In 1895, he wrote his first major dramatic work, " ." It was
produced the next year and it flopped hard… Chekov ran out of the theater during the second
act and said that he would never write another play.

32. A writer and theater director named Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko loved the play and

at the newly founded Moscow Art Theater.

Chekhov then wrote three more major works, "Uncle Vanya", "The Three Sisters", and "The
Cherry Orchard".
33. , it's just about playing cards or going for a walk or having a
late night vodka sesh.

He wrote, "In life, people do not shoot themselves or hang themselves or fall in love or deliver
themselves of clever sayings every minute. They spend most of their time eating, drinking,
running after women or men, or talking nonsense. It is therefore necessary that this should

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Study Guide
be shown on stage. Life on the stage should be as it really is and the people, too, should be as
they are."

34. He was a master of , a kind of misdirection in

which characters can't or won't say what they really mean but the meaning emerges anyway,
around and under and between the lines.

35. If "The Cherry Orchard" is a realistic drama, it also suggests a move toward

, as do the late plays of Ibsen and Strindberg.

36. Chekhov will always be associated with the theater that made him famous: the

.
37. If you've studied acting in the West, then you've probably experienced some version of
Stanislavski's system, but here's the thing: we what that system is.
Stanislavski was always changing it.
In order to make characters feel psychologically real, actors will familiarize themselves with a
character's given circumstances and ask how a person would behave within those circumstances.

38. This is called " ".

39. At one point, Stanislavski did suggest that actors should work with their own " " to
inhabit a role, but he later moved away from this and encouraged more expressive
physical explorations and improvisations.
40. The Stanislavski system, or the less than 100% faithful version of it that we have today,
Western Theater. Film and television, too.
41. The Irish Renaissance was largely ___________________________, celebrating Irish
history, folklore, and the Gaelic language.
42. The Abbey's first great playwright, whose play
"___________________________________" on the theater's second night, was John
Millington Synge.
43. For several summers, he studied the people and the customs of the Aran Islands, and
especially the language, a dialect that's rich, musical, and eloquent. This language really
_________________________ his writing.
44. As he wrote in _________________________ to his later play, "The Playboy of the
Western World,"
"In a good play ever speech should be as fully flavored as a nut or apple, and such speeches
cannot be written by anyone who works among people who have shut their lips on poetry. In
Ireland, for a few years more, we have a popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent,
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Study Guide
and tender; so that those of us who wish to write start with a chance that is not given to
writers in places where the springtime of the local life has been forgotten."

45. At first glance, his plays seem romantic, …But, Synge __________________________.
46. When the Abbey stages "Playboy of the Western World" … crowds tried to
_____________________ the play every night, and the police were called.
47. For Synge, the natural and the supernatural ___________________________ among the
rural Irish.
48. …Along came two Irishmen to _____________________________ English drama, and they
did it with wit.
49. And, to wit, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, AKA ___________________________.
50. After writing the tragedy "Vera" and then the censored symbolist drama "Salomé," Wilde
had his first ___________________________, "Lady Windermere's Fan," in 1892.
The play demonstrates his belief that…"We should treat all the trivial things of life
seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality."
51. His _________________________ and subversive work is the 1895 play "The Importance
of Being Earnest," one of the great stage comedies.
52. … George Bernard Shaw _____________________.

A brilliant critic and political philosopher, his plays are both brainy comedies and
articulations of his particular, and sometimes weird, beliefs about men, women,
evolution, and civil society.
53. He used ___________________ as a social critique in plays that are spikier and more
pointed than Wilde's.
54. Some of these ideas are provocative, _______________________, and even dangerous.

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