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Introduction: Theater: From the Mask to the Moderns
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15174 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1989 |
1,449 Words |
| Author
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Don Rubin
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In Egypt some three thousand years ago, theater was a participatory event. Throughout each year, vast community dramas were enacted that involved every level of the society from kings to criminals. Each member of the community understood how essential it was to be part of the experience. Each had a role to play in the dramatic structure that was at once social and religious, linked to both the polis and the gods.
Though the records are generally silent on this point, one assumes that the experience was a pleasurable one for most of those concerned. One can probably assume as well that through the experience as a whole--which lasted several days--the community drew together in many ways and came to understand on some root level the relationship of their lives to something larger.
Since that time, theater has changed in many ways but its essential nature has not changed all that much. It is still an event that requires an audience's participation and effort. One goes to it. It doesn't come to you. For the most part, it is still a shared experience. One doesn't do theater alone, and one doesn't experience it alone. It is also still, in many places and in many ways, a spectacle. For some, it is a spectacle that can make one understand both the world and the universe a little better. And it does still seem to give pleasure both to the doers and the watchers.
In a word, theater's ability to simply survive this long has been impressive. Although it was condemned by the early Christian church and its performers were threatened with excommunication, theater later found itself being used by those same church fathers as a device for attracting the attention and involvement of the not-so-faithful. It was from this root that the literary branches of theatrical art grew strong again and drama took on some responsibility as a kind of moral pulpit for the community. On the rough and less literary side, the form retained strong popularity even through the so-called Dark Ages with actors climbing on a wagon and wandering through Europe performing anything that would make money. It was during the Elizabethan period that these two broad strands of theatrical art--the literary and the popular--met and came to full fruition in the hands of such dramatists as Marlowe and Shakespeare. Both men connected their work to the polis, as well as to the universe at large. Not since the ancient Greeks had a nation's theater attracted such attention both within its community and abroad.
On a world basis, interest in theater has grown ever since. Without doubt, there is more theater being produced in more places and in more forms today than at any previous point in world history. Theater, for whatever reason, seems to be a human wish, and "human wishes," as the great English critic Eric Bentley once wrote, "affect history." The irony, of course, is that no one, not even Bentley, really believed deeply that theater would survive the onslaught of this century's technology media--particularly film and television.
Writing in 1949, Bentley speculated that
The second half of the twentieth century may see the
complete absorption of the theater art by film and
television…If (as nothing is eternal) the elimination
...
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