Drama Notes Flashcards
Minstrelsy
Audience: In the 30s & 40s, minstrelsy appealed mostly to working-class northern, often Irish immigrant, males. Later its appeal would broaden, its tone shift, and become more respectable.
Critical Observations:
Lott: 1st ‘native’ music and 1st national cultural form to portray what might be called a cultural ‘mix’
Lott: expressions of racial repulsion easily slid into racial envy
Lag in American Realism in Drama
–Lack of venues for experimentation until emergence of the Washington Square Players & the Provincetown Players (1914, 1915).
–American theatre was a comercial theatre with virtually no alternatives in view
–No govt subsidies like those that existed across much of Europe nor any corporate or society patrons
–Popular entertainment: ahead of music, reading, even sports; giving patrons what they wanted
Melodrama Traits
–Popular rather than “high art”
–Clear villain & hero
–Strong pathos & action that recognizes the virtues of suffering victims; moves audience to powerful sentiments
–Sympathy for another grounded in the manifestation of that person’s suffering
–Link between individual virtue and collective well-being
–Forced simplicity & unrealistic moral universe: an index of complexity & chaos of the context that produced it
–Brooks: “drama of morality: it strives to find, to articulate, to demonstrate, to ‘prove’ the existence of a moral universe which, though put into question, masked by villany and perversions of ethical judgment, does exist and can be made to assert its presence & its categorical force among men”
Analysis of Melodrama
Fundamentally modern
arising out of a post-sacred world where traditional imperatives of truth & morality had been violently questioned & yet in which there was still a need to forge some semblance of truth & morality
–a means of “resolving” the many contradictions of modern life
–Often deals with urbanization, cultural discontinuity, increased mobility, sensory complexity
–turmoil & timeliness of the issues it takes up
–Reliance on personality & revelation of personality through body & gesture as key to both emotional and moral truth (psychologization of character)
–Popular because of their ability to seem to resolve basic social contradictions at a moral level
–social problems of everyday reality (illegitimacy, racism, labor struggles, disease)
–Search for something lost, inadmissible & repressed
– personal innocence often retrieved through suffering, while the more profound social causes of suffering never addressed
American actors
After almost exclusively British actors on American boards before 1820, antebellum audiences preferred American actors to their English counterparts, detecting in the former the egalitarian virtues they cherished and, in the latter, the aristocratic hauteur they abhorred”
–Edwin Forrest supporters through things at British rival, crowd becomes a riot mob, throwing stones and refusing to disperse, militia fired into the crowd leaving more than twenty dead and scores wounded
Politics of Melodrama
–THE DRUNKARD (1844) denoted itself as a ‘Moral Domestic Drama’ and relied on a moralistic, nonpartisan answer to intemperance but by the 1850s moral suasion no longer seemed a viable reform tactic in politics or the stage; the persistent problem of alcohol required stronger measures
–Race, abolition, sectionalism: all explosive political issues largely avoided by melodrama through the 1840s, also became less taboo by the 1850s
–Tremendous success of UTC (1852) paved the way for a politicized, if not partisan, stage treatment of slavery. Aiken’s adaptation argues for immediate abolition.
–THE OCTOROON took an ambiguous stance on slavery
Margaret Fleming Reception
–Shocked Boston newspaper critics
–not successful with audiences
–financial failure; but called “the American Ibsen”
Setting of the OCTOROON
Roach
–Louisiana
–Scudder: “We are on the selvage of civilization”
–“selvage” means the edge of a fabric, woven thickly so that it will not unravel. A margin & boundary that by opposition defines the center. A Frontier.
–Two axes: Set at the point where these two axes crossed, the play stages a narrative of encounter, a dramatization of Anglo-American contact with the creolized interculture of the Latin Caribbean
–N-S: river systems of the MS basin with the Caribbean
–E-W: national expansion
Rachel Reception
–Winning play in NAACP 1916 playwriting contest judges including Locke & DuBois. Locke opposed it (Locke resigned).
How to get away from minstrelsy was up for debate:
–WEB Dubois: “four fundamental principles” of “real Negro theater”: 1. About us, 2. By us. 3. For us. 4. Near Us
–Locke: “the development of the folk play”; against the propaganda play, believed it fostered “melodramatic sentimentalism”; formalism in drama
–Hurston: “in the Jooks and the cabarets” (not white traditions), black aesthetic of the rural south
–Du Bois: “All Art is propaganda”; should be ideological and instrumental in dismantling racism
–1st extant play to shed light on lynching’s aftermath.
Reception of The Drunkard
–Opened at Boston Museum: ran more than 100 nights across 2 seasons, the 1st time American play achieved this feat.
–100 nights @ PT Barnum’s Philadelphia Museum.
–Ran continuously for more than 150 @ PT Barnum’s American Museum in NY (3,000 seat theatre).
–Unsurpassed until the Aiken-Howard adaptation of UTC in 1852
The Drunkard Bodily Integrity
tranquil domestic spaces lost & recovered, In most melodramas threats to the individual’s bodily integrity represent the danger to their moral integrity, embodying in turn a threat to the integrity of the entire community
–DT (“snakes, how they coil round me”)
Reception UTC
–One of the 1st melodramas to be shown without a variety fare (tight-rope walking, Otello)
–Howard: “When I told the manager ‘Uncle Tom’ must constitute the entire performance, he flouted the idea; said we would have to shut up in a week. But I carried my point, and we didn’t shut up either. People came to the theatre by hundreds, who were never inside its doors before; we raised our prices, which no other theatre in NY could do”
–as many as 50 people eventually saw the play for every person who read the novel (which outsold every other book in 19th century except the Bible)
–Put homegrown melodrama on the map
–Made melodrama more respectable (new middle class audience, matinee)
–Purdy, the National Theater manager, admitted into a segregated but not badly placed section near the pit a number of free blacks.
Waiting for Lefty Reception
–“the birth cry of the thirties”
–Banned in seven cities US
–Odets was kidnapped and badly beaten
–Produced and Banned around the world (Moscow, Tokyo, Johannesburg)
–Once moved to Broadway, bad reviews: “the contagion of the mob spirit” did not spread through the audience, not even “good propaganda,” had “no real worth as drama”, “foreign in emphasis and appeals primarily to a small coterie, “not American or for the average American”
Waiting for Lefty Style
–Distinguished by a kind of poetic, metaphor-laden street talk
“That sort of life ain’t for the dogs which is us. Christ, Baby! I got like thunder in my chest when we’re together. God damnit, it’s trying to be a man on earth.”
“The Clancy family is growing nuts”
–Drops audience right in with little exposition
–Character more important than plot (Chekhov-ian)
–Social realism, audience identification, trying to “break the proscenium arch”
Under the Gaslight Characters
- -Laura: taken in as a beggar girl (switched at birth)
- -Ray: Laura’s fiance
- -Pearl: Laura’s fun-loving supposed cousin who flirts w/ Ray
- -Snorkey
