Realistic drama remained popular throughout the twentieth century, but from its beginnings it has been continually challenged by nonrealistic modes of theater. By the end of the nineteenth century, playwrights reacting against realism began to develop a variety of new approaches to setting, action, and character. Instead of creating a slice of life onstage, modern experimental playwrights drew on purely theatrical devices, ranging from stark sets and ritualistic actions to symbolic characterizations and audience participation. In general, such devices were designed to jar audiences’ expectations and to heighten their awareness that what appeared before them was indeed a theatrical production. A glimpse of some of the nonrealistic movements in drama suggests how the possibilities for affecting audiences have been broadened by experimental theater.
Symbolist drama rejected the realists’ assumption that life can be understood objectively and scientifically. The symbolists emphasized a subjective, emotional response to life because they believed that ultimate realities can be recognized only intuitively. Since absolute truth cannot be directly perceived, symbolists such as the Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlinck (1862–1949) sought to express spiritual truth through settings, characters, and actions that suggest a transcendent reality. Maeterlinck’s most famous symbolist play, Pelléas and Mélisande (1892), is a story of love and vengeance that includes mysterious forebodings, symbolic objects, and unexplained powerful forces. The elements of the play make no attempt to create the texture of ordinary life, but rather project a parallel world that is more like imagined mythology than like reality.
Other playwrights — such as William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) in Ireland, Paul Claudel (1868–1955) in France, Leonid Andreyev (1871–1919) in Russia, and Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) in Spain — also used some of the techniques associated with symbolist plays, but the movement never enjoyed wide popularity because audiences often found the plays’ action too vague and their language too cryptic. Nevertheless, symbolist drama had an important influence on the work of subsequent playwrights, such as Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. These dramatists effectively used symbols in plays that contain both realistic and nonrealistic qualities.
Another nonrealistic movement, known as expressionism, was popular from the end of World War I until the mid-1920s. Expressionist playwrights emphasized the internal lives of their characters and deliberately distorted reality by creating an outward manifestation of an inner state of being. The late plays of Swedish dramatist August Strindberg (1849–1912) anticipate expressionistic techniques. Strindberg’s preface to A Dream Play (1902) reflects the impact that Freudian psychology would eventually have on the theater:
The author has tried to imitate the disconnected but seemingly logical form of the dream. Anything may happen; everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. On an insignificant background of reality, imagination designs and embroiders novel patterns: a medley of memories, experiences, free fancies, absurdities, and improvisations.
In such nonrealistic drama the action does not have to proceed chronologically because the playwright dramatizes the emotional life of the characters, which blends the past with the present rather than moving in a fixed, linear way. This fluidity of development can be seen in the flashbacks of Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Miller’s Death of a Salesman.
The epic theater of Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) is, like symbolism and expressionism, a long way from the realistic elements in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Basing his methods on the political philosophy of Karl Marx, Brecht kept a distance between his characters and the audience. This strategy of alienation was designed to alert audiences to important social problems that might be overlooked if an individual’s struggles became too emotionally absorbing (in other words, if the audience fell under the spell of realism). Brecht’s drama, by casting new light on chronic human problems such as poverty, injustice, and war, was a means to convey hope and evidence that society could be changed for the better. Brecht called his drama “epic” to distinguish it from Aristotle’s notion of drama. The episodic structure was designed to prevent the audience from being swept up in the action or losing themselves in an inevitable tragedy. Instead, Brecht wanted the audience to analyze the action and realize that certain consequences weren’t inevitable but could be avoided. This distancing, the dramatization of societal issues, and the use of loosely connected scenes sometimes narrated by a kind of stage manager are the hallmarks of epic drama.
Epic theater revels in stylized theatricality. The major action in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, for example, consists of a play within a play. Brecht’s dramas use suggestive rather than detailed settings, and their scenery and props are frequently changed as the audience watches. His actors make clear that they are pretending to be characters. They may speak or sing in verse, address the audience, or comment on issues with other characters who are not participants in the immediate action. In brief, Brecht’s theater is keenly conscious of itself as theater.
In contrast to this didactic theater, the theater of the absurd was a response to the twentieth century’s loss of faith in reason, religion, and life itself. These doubts produced an approach to drama that emphasizes chaotic, irrational forces and portrays human beings as more the victims than the makers of their world. This term was invented by drama critic Martin Esslin in 1961, reflecting an important trend that flourished in the 1950s.
Absurdists such as Samuel Beckett (1906–1989), French dramatist Eugène Ionesco (1912–1994), English playwright Harold Pinter (1930–2008), and American writer Edward Albee (1928–2016) employ a variety of approaches to drama, but they share some assumptions about what subjects are important. Absurdism challenges the belief that life is ordered and meaningful, or that we can make sense of it rationally. Instead of positing traditional values that give human beings a sense of purpose in life, absurdists dramatize our inability to comprehend fully our identities and destinies. Unlike heroic characters such as Oedipus or Hamlet, who retain their dignity despite their defeats, the characters in absurdist dramas frequently seem pathetically comic as they drift from one destructive moment to the next. These antiheroes are often bewildered, ineffectual, deluded, and lost. If they learn anything, it is that the world isolates them in an existence devoid of God and absolute values. (For an example of absurdist drama, see Pinter’s play The Birthday Party in Chapter 41.)
The basic premise of absurdism — that life is meaningless — is often presented in a nonrealistic manner to disrupt our expectations. In a realistic play such as Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, characters act pretty much the way we believe people behave. The motivation of these characters and the plausibility of their actions are comprehensible, but in an absurdist drama we are confronted with characters who appear in a series of disconnected incidents that lead to deeper confusion. What would we make of Nora if Ibsen had her appear in the final act costumed as a doll? This would be not only bizarre but unacceptable in a realistic play. However, it could make dramatic sense in an absurdist adaptation that sought to dramatize Nora’s loss of identity and dehumanization as a result of her marriage.
Nora’s appearance as a doll would, of course, be laughably inconsistent with what we judge to be real or reasonable. And yet we might find ourselves sympathizing with her situation. Suppose that instead of slamming the door and leaving her husband in the final scene, Nora moved stiffly about the room costumed as a doll while Helmer complacently sipped sherry and read the evening paper. Such an ending would suggest that she had been defeated by the circumstances in her life. Her condition — being nothing more than someone’s toy — would be both absurd and pathetic. If we laughed at this scene, we would do so because Nora’s situation is grotesquely humorous, a parody of her assumptions, hopes, and expectations. This is the world of tragicomedy, where laughter and pain coexist and where there is neither the happy resolution that typifies comic plots nor the transformational suffering that brings clarification to the tragic hero. It is the world dramatized, for example, in the opening scene of Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter when Ben tells Gus about an item he’s read in the paper.
Ben: A man of eighty-seven wanted to cross the road. But there was a lot of traffic, see? He couldn’t see how he was going to squeeze through. So he crawled under a lorry [truck].
Gus: He what?
Ben: He crawled under a lorry. A stationary lorry.
Gus: No?
Ben: The lorry started and ran over him.
Gus: Go on!
Ben: That’s what it says here.
Gus: Get away.
Ben: It’s enough to make you want to puke, isn’t it?
Gus: Who advised him to do a thing like that?
Ben: A man of eighty-seven crawling under a lorry!
Gus: It’s unbelievable.
Ben: It’s down here in black and white.
Gus: Incredible.
As much as Gus finds the story difficult to believe and Ben is sickened by it, it is a fact that the old man was crushed under ridiculous circumstances. His death is unexpected, accidental, incomprehensible, and meaningless — except that what happened to the old man is, from an absurdist’s perspective, really no different from what life has in store for all of us one way or the other.
An absurdist playwright may, as Pinter does, employ realistic settings and speech, but he or she goes beyond realistic conventions to challenge the rational assumptions we make about our lives. Pinter insists that “a play is not an essay.” Background information, character motivation, action — nothing presented on an absurdist’s stage is governed by the conventions of realism. The absurdists typically refuse to create the illusion of reality because there is, finally, no reality to imitate. If conversations in their plays are sometimes fragmented and seemingly inconsequential, the reason is that absurdists dramatize people’s combined inability and unwillingness to communicate with one another. Indeed, Samuel Beckett’s Act without Words contains no dialogue, and in his Krapp’s Last Tape a single character addresses only his own tape-recorded voice. To some extent we must suspend common sense and logic if we are to appreciate the visions and voices in an absurdist play.
A related development in the mid- to late-twentieth century is something French playwright Antonin Artaud defines as the theater of cruelty. In this type of theater, the play isn’t meant to represent life as realism did, but rather it emphasizes experience, including the experience of attending a play. The theater of cruelty was often based on primitive rituals and myths. “Cruelty,” according to Artaud, was not necessarily bodily or emotional violence, but rather a kind of shock that audience members might feel, resulting in a changed outlook on the perception of their world. The theater of cruelty has not retained as much notoriety as the theater of the absurd, but the two are closely related. The theater of cruelty was perhaps embraced by later avant-garde playwrights such as Amiri Baraka who saw the political potential afforded by the techniques that Artaud and others initiated.
Although many other nonrealistic movements developed in the twentieth century, these four — symbolism, expressionism, epic theater, and the theater of the absurd/theater of cruelty — embrace the major differences between nonrealistic and realistic drama. Once realistic theater had been scrutinized as a middle-class fantasy, playwrights pushed theatrical conventions to extremes as a way of developing new political consciousness. In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, some acting companies in New York completely collapsed the usual distinctions between audience and actors. The Living Theater went even further by moving into the streets, where the actors and audiences engaged in dramatic political statements aimed at raising the social consciousness of people wherever they were. Some critics argued that this was not really theater but merely an exuberant kind of political rally. However, proponents of these productions — known as guerrilla theater — argued that protest drama is both politically and artistically valid. The Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s, led by a bohemian poet named LeRoi Jones who changed his name to Amiri Baraka after undergoing a political awakening, wrote plays aimed at heightening the consciousness of African Americans who had long been oppressed by white America and who had also been largely denied authentic representation on the American stage. Audience members of a play like Baraka’s Dutchman (1964) or Ed Bullins’s Goin’ a Buffalo (1968) were likely to leave the theater agitated, angry, and inspired to change their society even though these plays did not have a clear or coherent message or moral. This effect is not as directly available through realism.
Although today’s playwrights seem considerably less inclined to take to the streets, there is a tolerance for a wide range of possible relationships between actors and audiences. Audiences (and readers) can expect symbolic characters, expressionistic settings, poetic language, monologues, and extreme actions in productions that also contain realistic elements. In Route 1 & 9 (1981), a piece created by an experimental theater company called the Wooster Group, for example, audiences found themselves confronted with passages from Thornton Wilder’s idealized version of America in Our Town that were coupled with a pornographic film and a black vaudeville act. This unlikely combination was used to comment on Wilder’s conception of America in which issues of sex and race are largely ignored. Increasingly, experimental theater has cultivated an eclectic approach to drama, using a variety of media, cultures, playwrights, and even languages to enrich an audience’s experience. Paula Vogel’s How I Learned to Drive (see Chapter 41), for instance, encourages directors to make use of vintage soft-porn images to be displayed on a screen behind an actress who is posing in increasingly suggestive ways for a camera. The stage directions give a range of creative license to the director in terms of these elements that would not have been available when modern realism was in vogue. Ironically, much of the play takes place in a car, and this illusion is accomplished simply by having the two main characters sit in chairs facing the audience: the car is entirely conjured by our imagination, as is a good deal of what goes on inside the car.