Theatre or Theater for Beginners

Caryl Churchill – Form experimentation London, 1982. The audience at the Royal Court Theatre murmurs with anticipation as they open their programs to an unusual page: a dinner menu and biographies of characters who span centuries. Soon the lights dim, and on stage an epic dinner party springs to life. Around a long, glittering table sit women from different times and places: there’s Isabella Bird,...

Sarah Kane – In-yer-face theatre London, January 1995. A cold rain slicks the streets of Sloane Square as theatergoers file into the tiny upstairs auditorium of the Royal Court Theatre. They don’t know quite what they’re in for, but rumors have been swirling: a new play by a 23-year-old woman that is supposed to be shocking beyond belief. The lights dim, and Blasted begins. On stage, a hotel room...

Ariane Mnouchkine – Collective creation Paris, 1973. The dim, cavernous interior of La Cartoucherie—a former munitions factory on the outskirts of the city—has been transformed into a bustling revolutionary fairground. It is here that 1789, a theatrical reenactment of the French Revolution, is about to unfold, not on a single stage but all around the audience. The spectators, a mix of students, wo...

Judith Malina & Julian Beck – The Living Theatre New York City, 1963. It’s a sweltering August evening on West 14th Street, and inside a small, dimly lit theatre, hell is breaking loose on stage. The play is The Brig, a searing depiction of a day in a U.S. Marine Corps military prison. Under the unforgiving glare of fluorescent lights, young men in khaki uniforms bark orders at other men who s...

Richard Schechner – Performance theory

Heiner Müller – Fragmented drama East Berlin, 1961. The auditorium of the Volksbühne theatre is packed to the rafters on a damp autumn night. A new play called Die Umsiedlerin (“The Resettler Woman”) is making its debut, and whispers have spread that this piece might be controversial. Behind the curtain, the playwright Heiner Müller paces, a slender 32-year-old with a mop of dark hair, chain-smoki...

Robert Wilson – Slow time, visual theatre Avignon, 1976. Late on a July evening in the cobbled courtyard of the Théâtre Municipal, hundreds of festival-goers sit on wooden benches beneath a darkening sky. On stage, a strange and hypnotic tableau unfolds. A line of figures in unison slow-motion crosses from left to right, their movements deliberate and dreamlike. A young woman in a white dress step...

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970 Federico García Lorca’s theatre unfolds like a folk song that turns into a scream. He was a Spanish poet-playwright who infused the real stories of rural Spain with surreal imagery and lyrical symbolism, creating a style often called poetic realism. In Lorca’s plays, the setting might be a humble village or a family home bound by tradition, but the language...

Augusto Boal enters the story of modern theatre the way a spark enters dry grass: not politely, not quietly, and not with any respect for the comfortable boundaries that keep “art” safely separated from “life.” If you look at the twentieth century’s theatre revolution as a long argument about what theatre is for, Boal is the figure who steps forward and says: it is for people who are not in the ro...

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970 In a Harold Pinter play, what isn’t said often matters more than what is. A pause can last an eternity; a simple phrase like “Come in” can carry a threat. Pinter’s dramatic world is one of everyday banality pierced by sudden menace. He had a word for the peculiar blend of humor and dread in his early plays: “comedy of menace.” Critics noticed that while you...

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970 Tennessee Williams brings us into the steamy, gothic heart of American life, especially life in the old South, and he does it with a poet’s touch and a truth-teller’s grit. His plays are lush with desire – sexual longing, yearning for love or escape – and at the same time they seethe with violence, both physical and emotional. He once described his work as...

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970 Tennessee Williams brings us into the steamy, gothic heart of American life, especially life in the old South, and he does it with a poet’s touch and a truth-teller’s grit. His plays are lush with desire – sexual longing, yearning for love or escape – and at the same time they seethe with violence, both physical and emotional. He once described his work as...

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970 Eugène Ionesco found the absurdity of life not in grand philosophical statements but in the petty routines of everyday people. A man and woman sit in armchairs, trading banal phrases about the weather and grocery prices – until, to their amazement, they realize they’re husband and wife. This iconic scene from Ionesco’s first play, The Bald Soprano (1949), i...

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970 Jean Genet strolls into the theatre carrying a lifetime of defiance. Here is a man who spent his youth as a thief, vagrant, and outcast, a gay man and ex-convict who inverted society’s judgments by embracing the label of “criminal” as a kind of honor. Genet’s art is the art of the outsider, and when he turned to playwriting in the 1940s and 50s, he did so w...

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970 A pair of tramps on a country road, waiting by a bare tree for a man who never comes – this is Samuel Beckett’s contribution to theatre, and it changed the course of drama. When Waiting for Godot premiered in 1953, audiences saw a play where “nothing happens… twice.” Many were baffled or angry. But beneath its apparent nothingness, Beckett was digging towar...

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970 Picture an empty stage – just a bare space. Now imagine someone walks across that space while someone else watches. “That is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged,” wrote Peter Brook . This simple yet radical idea guided Brook, one of the 20th century’s great directors. He sought the essence of theatre beyond all ornament. Brook famously de...

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970 Jerzy Grotowski begins where others end: an empty room, a handful of actors, and an audience about to become something more than passive viewers. In 1960s Poland, behind the Iron Curtain, Grotowski quietly revolutionized theatre by stripping it to the bone. He argued that theatre “should not, because it could not, compete” with the spectacular illusions of...

THE RADICALS & AVANT-GARDE 1920–1970 Antonin Artaud enters the story of theatre like a jolt of electricity into a dead nerve. In the 1920s and 30s, this French poet-actor raged against “civilized” theatre, insisting that beneath society’s polite masks lay repressed instincts clawing to break free. He believed theatre’s true function was to “rid humankind of these repressions and liberate each...

REVOLUTION OF THE STAGE 1700–1850 August Strindberg – Expressionism & the unconscious It is a sultry Midsummer Eve in 1889, past midnight. In a cramped upstairs hall of a Copenhagen student club, by the flicker of gaslight, an illicit theatrical experiment reaches its climax. On a makeshift stage – really just a cleared space at one end of the room – a young woman in a tattered silk evening dr...

REVOLUTION OF THE STAGE 1700–1850 Henrik Ibsen – Modern realism born The final line of dialogue hangs in the air of the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen on a frigid December evening, 1879. A young woman named Nora Helmer stands at the threshold of her cozy bourgeois home, facing her bewildered husband. “I must stand quite alone,” she says calmly, her voice carrying through the stunned silence of the au...

REVOLUTION OF THE STAGE 1700–1850 Goethe – The director as visionary Night has fallen in Weimar, early August 1831. In the study of an old baroque house on the Frauenplan, an aged Johann Wolfgang von Goethe sits at his mahogany desk, quill in hand, the glow of a solitary oil lamp casting his long shadow on walls lined with books and curiosities. He is eighty-one years old, his once auburn hair now...

REVOLUTION OF THE STAGE 1700–1850 Friedrich Schiller – The idealist stage A cold January night in 1782 at the Mannheim Court Theatre. The chandeliers’ flames flicker as a restless audience packs the hall – students in threadbare coats jostling beside merchants and minor nobles. A rumor has swept through the crowd that this new play, Die Räuber (The Robbers), is something wild and unprecedented, wr...

REVOLUTION OF THE STAGE 1700–1850 Gotthold Lessing – Dramaturgy begins Gotthold Ephraim Lessing sits in a dimly lit box of the Hamburg National Theatre on a late September night in 1767, his pulse quickening with anticipation. On stage, the final act of his new comedy Minna von Barnhelm unfolds before a packed house. In the flicker of oil lamps, two characters – a proud Prussian officer and a spir...

REVOLUTION OF THE STAGE 1700–1850 Carlo Goldoni – Reform of Italian comedy Carlo Goldoni stands in the wings of the Teatro San Luca on a crisp Venetian evening, the year 1753. Beyond the velvet curtain, lantern light dances on the ornate Baroque balconies where Venice’s mingled crowd of nobles and common citizens sit eagerly. On stage, the actors perform Goldoni’s newest comedy La Locandiera with...

A hush fell over the glittering salon at the Palace of Versailles in May 1664 as King Louis XIV and his courtiers gathered for a new play by the royal troupe’s leading playwright. On stage, a wealthy gentleman named Orgon was shown falling under the spell of a seemingly pious houseguest, Tartuffe, who spouted sanctimonious platitudes while secretly coveting Orgon’s wife and fortune. Laughter rippl...