Final Exam Flashcards
Bertolt Brecht
Comes to Drama through Poetry
Associated with Epic Theatre
A Theatre of Political Reality
Greatest impact on Germany, Britain, Brazil, the United States, and India
Samuel Beckett
Comes to Drama through Fiction
Associated with Existential or “Absurdist” Drama
A Drama of Poetic Reality
Greatest impact on France, Poland, Japan, and also the United States and Britain
Cabarets and Chaos:
Berlin is the cultural center
Brecht influenced by cabaret scene
The Rise of National Socialism
Rampant inflation
Economic downturn
“Brown Shirts” promote Hitler’s agenda
The development of “Epic Theatre”
In conversation with, but in opposition to, Expressionism
Aristotle
Catharsis: the purging of negative emotion
Brecht
Catharsis prevents theatre from being useful, as it simply reenforces the status quo
Brecht moves towards a Dialectical Theatre:
A theatre of ideas to affect political and social change
He Opposes a Bourgeois Theatre (”Culinary Theatre”):
Seeks to destroy naturalism, “fourth walls.“
Gestus:
The “V-Effect”
A single physical action
Shows the social “realism” of the
character
A tool for “Epic Acting”
Verfremdungseffekt (“Distancing Effect”)
This creates the “V-Effect”
Distances the audience from empathy, plot, catharsis
Lets you see true “realism” – the social and political powers
Character is not defined by emotion, but social relationships
Characters still have emotions!
The Production That Changed Everything:San Quentin Prison, California, November 19, 1957
Following an important production in a German prison in 1953, where inmates had had the play smuggled in.
The San Francisco Actors Workshop
Directed by Herbert Blau
Performed on the prison gallows
The beginning of prison theatre programs in the U.S.
“Nothing Comes from Nothing” : King Lear
Bleak comedy in a ruined world.
The disintegration of language
The play ends in an exhausted acceptance of horror:
“Our present business is general woe.”
“Never, never, never, never, never.”
What object does Helen use to kill her husband?
A bottle filled with rocks
What physical change Helen protest just before her execution?
Cutting her hair
What was Helen’s relationship with George before they were married?
Boss/employee
What is the name of the man with whom Helen had an affair?
Dick Roe
In the first scene, what reason does Helen give for being late to work?
She needed to step off the subway to get some air
What article of clothing does Estragon always take off and put back on?
Boot
What is the relationship between Pozzo and Lucky?
Master and slave
- How is the tree different in Act II of the play Godot?
It has grown leaves
- What practical reason do Didi and Gogo give for not hanging themselves?
They do not have any rope
- In act II, which character remembers the previous interaction with Pozzo and Lucky?
Vladimir (Didi)
- Where does the play M. Butterfly begin?
Paris prison cell
- According the trial against Song, what are the two crimes that Song has committed against the cultural revolution?
Being homosexual and being an artist
Which character from Madama Butterfly does Hwang cast as a parallel to Comrade Chin?
Suzuki
- What does Song do as Gallimard dies?
Smokes a cigarette
- What crime is Gallimard In jail for?
Espionage
- What does the Foundling Father carry in the cherry-wood box?
Beards
- What play acts as the intertext with The America Play?
Our American Cousin
- During the reenactments, what does the Foundling Father do just before he is shot?
Laugh
- What is the setting of The America Play?
The Great Hole of History and the Replica of the Great Hole of History
- What is Brazil’s job?
A wailer (or mourner)
What tribal nation are Elesin and Olunde a part of?
Yoruba
Who was the bride supposed to marry before Elesin asked to marry her?
Iyaloja’s son
- What object does Elesin use to commit suicide?
His chains
- What is Amusa’s religion?
Islam
- What prompts Olunde to return to Nigeria?
A telegram that says the king is dead
- Which playwright, who we have not read but is mentioned frequently in lecture, did Steffen show us as a Pez dispenser?
Henrik Ibsen
- What term for radical art movements literally translates to “vanguard”?
Avant-garde
- Which Maureen Dallas Watkins play was paralleled with Machinal due to similar plot lines and time periods?
Chicago
- Which famous fellow Irish writer did Beckett defend in an essay?
James Joyce (was defending Finnegan’s Wake – a notoriously unreadable novel)
- What was significant about the 1957 California production of Waiting for Godot?
Performed in San Quentin Prison, beginning of US prison theatre programs
- What aspect of Aristotle’s theory of theatre did Brecht oppose?
Catharsis because it reinforces the status quo
- In the book Orientalism, Edward Said coined the term”___ geography” to describe concepts of the orient.
Imaginative
- What bizarre connection did John Wilkes Booth’s brother Edwin have to the Lincoln family?
He saved the life of Robert Lincoln (Abe’s son) several months before Abe’s assassination
- Suzan-Lori parks said, “history is time that….”
Won’t quit
- What two “worlds” do Yoruba rituals integrate?
The mortal world and the spiritual/ancestral world
What does Olunde go to London to study
Medicine
A pair of boots
Waiting for Godot
A television
The American play
A telephone
Machinal
A kimono
M. Butterfly
A masked costume
Death and the Kings Horseman
According to lecture, Samuel Beckett invented the term “theatre of the absurd” to describe his plays.
True or False
False
What character is very concerned about the condition of their hands?
The Young Woman
Term from jazz, Suzan Lori Parks
Rep and Rev
Oscar Wilde and Beckett were born in Dublin and they both died in __________.
Paris
What play was being performed when Lincoln was assassinated?
Our American Cousin
Who inspired Suzan Lori Parks?
James Baldwin
Who was Eugene Oneil?
He was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into U.S. drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish playwright August Strindberg. The drama Long Day’s Journey into Night is often numbered on the short list of the finest U.S. plays in the 20th century
Who was Henrik Ibsen?
He was a Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. As one of the founders of Modernism in theatre, Ibsen is often referred to as “the father of realism” and one of the most influential playwrights of his time.[2] His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People,
Mythological character was chosen as representative of existential condition by Albert Camus?
Sisyphus
Who did Euripides inspire?
Wole Soyinka
