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Exploring Realism in Theatre: Origins, Script Analysis, Impact and More

By Happy Sharer

Introduction

Realism in theatre is a style of performance and production that seeks to portray characters and events as realistically as possible. It began in the 19th century as a reaction against the highly stylized forms of theatre popular at the time, such as melodrama. Realism in theatre focuses on the psychological truth of characters and their relationships, as well as attempting to create a believable world on stage, often through detailed sets and costumes.

Origins of Realistic Theatre

Realism in theatre has its roots in the 19th century, when it emerged as a reaction to the highly stylized forms of theatre popular at the time, such as melodrama. The emergence of realism was also influenced by other factors, such as the rise of naturalistic painting and photography, which helped to create a sense of realism in art and culture. In addition, the industrial revolution had changed the way people lived and worked, and this had an impact on theatre, as it sought to reflect the changing times.

The first major proponent of realism in theatre was German playwright and director, Georg Büchner. His plays were notable for their focus on the inner lives of characters and their emphasis on psychological truth. Other influential figures in the development of realism included Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and August Strindberg. All of these writers sought to create a more realistic form of theatre, which focused on the inner lives of characters and sought to create a believable world on stage.

Script Analysis

Realism in theatre can be seen most clearly in the writing of plays. Realistic scripts focus on character development and dialogue, while avoiding melodramatic plot twists and over-the-top theatricality. Characters are usually portrayed as complex individuals, with flaws and strengths, and their relationships with one another are explored in depth. Dialogue is often written in a naturalistic style, with characters speaking in their own voices, rather than using formal language or grandiose speeches.

In addition, realistic scripts often have a linear structure, with a beginning, middle and end, and a clear story arc. This structure helps to create a sense of realism by showing how characters’ lives unfold in a logical and consistent manner. Realistic scripts also tend to avoid obvious symbolism and metaphor, instead focusing on creating a believable world and exploring the psychology of characters.

Impact of Realism on Modern Theatre

Realism in theatre has had a profound impact on modern theatre. It has changed the way plays are written and performed, and has encouraged the development of new styles and genres. Over time, different types of realism have emerged, such as expressionism, absurdism and postmodernism, all of which have their roots in the principles of realism.

Realism has also had an impact on the way actors approach their roles. Actors now strive to create believable characters and tell stories in a realistic manner, rather than relying on exaggerated gestures and theatricality. This has led to a shift away from traditional acting techniques towards more naturalistic performance styles.

Realism in theatre can also be seen in the way sets are designed. Sets should be designed to create a believable world, with detailed props and scenery that help to transport the audience into the realm of the play. Lighting is also important, as it can help to create atmosphere and mood, and can be used to enhance the realism of a scene.

In addition, realistic sets should also be designed with an eye for detail. Props and furniture should be chosen carefully to create a believable environment, and should be placed in such a way as to suggest a lived-in space. The use of lighting and sound can also help to create a realistic atmosphere.

Costume Design

Costume design is also an important element of realism in theatre. Costumes should be chosen to create believable characters and to suggest their inner lives and motivations. Costumes should also be designed to reflect the period in which the play is set, and should be chosen to enhance the realism of the production.

In addition, costumes can also be used to create a sense of realism by suggesting details about a character’s lifestyle and background. For example, a wealthy character might be dressed in expensive clothing, while a poorer character might be dressed in more basic attire. Costumes can also be used to suggest certain emotions or states of mind, such as sadness or joy.

Role of Realism in Contemporary Theatre

Realism in theatre is still an important element of contemporary theatre, although it has been adapted and changed over time. Technology has had a huge impact on theatre, with many productions making use of digital effects and interactive elements to create a more realistic experience. The rise of social media has also had an impact, with many plays incorporating elements of social media into their storytelling.

Realism in theatre is also still evolving, with new forms emerging as theatre artists explore new ways of telling stories. While some plays may focus on creating a realistic world, others may focus on exploring abstract concepts or pushing the boundaries of what is considered ‘realistic’. Ultimately, realism in theatre is a living, breathing art form, and its evolution will continue to shape the future of theatre.

Realism in theatre is an important element of performance and production. It has its roots in the 19th century, and has since evolved to incorporate new technologies and social media. Realistic scripts focus on character development and dialogue, while sets and costumes should be chosen to create a believable world. Realism in theatre continues to evolve, and its influence on modern theatre is undeniable.

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Hi, I'm Happy Sharer and I love sharing interesting and useful knowledge with others. I have a passion for learning and enjoy explaining complex concepts in a simple way.

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Real Theatre: Essays in Experience

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This article focuses on the possible outcomes that may unfold when personal narratives have been intentionally applied on stage to generate a tension between the ideas of reality and fiction in performance. The article uses theoretical references that conceptualize the notion of the 'Real'-from the social context of the 1960s to the present-and follows the thoughts of philosophers like Debord, Baudrillard and Rosset with the aim to consider theater and performance as artistic fields that have the potential to interrogate totalizing statements about the truth in today's world. Keywords: Personal Narratives. Reality. Fiction. Truth. Theater of the Real.

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Over the last few decades, documentary theatre has experienced a boom in popularity with the commercial and critical success of works such as Anna Deveare Smith's 'Twilight: Los Angeles' (1994), Tectonic Theatre's 'The Laramie Project' (2001) and docudramas by David Hare such as 'Stuff Happens' (2004) and 'The Permanent Way' (2005). Recent works span everything from natural disaster survival stories, to the staging of dramatized versions of inquests to well as the examination of family violence in New Zealand in Hilary Halba's and Stuart Young's 'Hush' (2009 - present). Whether this documentary boom will follow the cycle of its economic counterpart and result in a bust can only be seen with the benefit of time. Rather, this paper focuses on the nature of representation in documentary theatre, in particular its relationship to the real. It is argued that the complexities involved in, and approaches to, representing the real in performance, place documentary theatre along a series of spectra. Documentary theatre does echo economic patterns in that at least two 2 polarised extremes of the form would seem to exist. As the terminology of a spectrum implies though, these opposing strategies exist more as a range of shifting, uncertain attempts to reconcile competing tensions, rather than as a sinusoidally oscillating pair of opposites. Attempts to avoid manipulating and aestheticizing the source material can result in strangely muted presentations that strip the drama from theatrical representation, placing it at one end of this spectrum. Other attempts to creatively shape and reconfigure testimony and context, can result in a heightened aestheticization and sensationalism. This theoretically pushes the performances to a "boom" out of tune or out of synchronicity with thesource material and to the other end of a perceived fiction-reality spectrum. This paper will examine some of the practices and ideas that inform the choices practitioners make in representing the "real" in performance and examine the aesthetic and ethical ethical impact these choices can have on the resulting performances.

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Theatre can be broadly construed as a cultural system for collectively modelling and experiencing life, thus as manifesting the dynamics inherent to all evolving cultural systems. Such is the definition underpinning the current paper, written from a theatre scholar's perspective, and employing as a backdrop Gilbert Simondon's proposal that individuation constitutes a kind of theatre. Notions of "existential pluralism" (Etienne Souriau) and "agential intra-actions" (Karen Barad) are used in attempts to identify theatre as a catalyst for the renewal of cultural experience vit¬¬al for sustaining projective powers of the collective imagination. Theatre architectures ranging from the physically sited to the digitally networked involve unique socio-technical craftsmanship and hodological or wayfaring skills, to allow the emergence of interhuman relations Simondon describes as "transindividual".

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Realism and Theatre

Realism is the movement toward representing reality as it is, in art. Realistic drama is an attempt to portray life on stage, a movement away from the conventional melodramas and sentimental comedies of the 1700s. It is expressed in theatre through the use of symbolism, character development, stage setting and storyline and is exemplified in plays such as Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. The arrival of realism was indeed good for theatre as it promoted greater audience involvement and raised awareness of contemporary social and moral issues .

It also provided and continues to provide a medium through which playwrights can express their views about societal values, attitudes and morals. A Doll’s House is the tragedy of a Norwegian housewife who is compelled to challenge law, society and her husband’s value system. It can be clearly recognized as a realistic problem drama, for it is a case where the individual is in opposition to a hostile society . Ibsen’s sympathy with the feminine cause has been praised and criticized; as he requires the audience to judge the words and actions of the characters in order to eassess the values of society.

The characters in A Doll’s House are quite complex and contradictory, no longer stereotypes. In Act II, Nora expresses her repulsion about a fancy dress worn to please Torvald (her husband): “I wish I’d torn it to pieces”; she attempts to restore it and resign herself to her situation right after: “I’ll ask Mrs Linde to help”. In Act III, Torvald ignores his wife’s plea for forgiveness in order to make a moral judgement: “You’ve killed my happiness . You’ve destroyed my future”. “I can never trust you again. ” Later on in the same act, he ontradicts himself: “I’ll change.

I can change-“; much after Nora confronts him: “Sit here, Torvald. We have to come to terms”. “There’s a lot to say”. Here, Ibsen shows us he has worked in depth with the psychology of the characters, giving them a sense of complexity and realism . Playgoers therefore recognize the revelation of characters through memory. Thus drama became an experience closely impinging on the conscience of the audience. Ibsen was also unique for his use of symbolism to assist realism on stage. Symbolic significance is presented through the detail of design, props nd actions of the characters.

For example, in Act III, Nora goes offstage to get changed; “I’m changing. No more fancy dress”. It is a symbolic representation of her personal change, one where she has come to the realization that she has been living the life of a doll, confined to the roles of a “featherbrain”, “plaything”, “dove”, “skylark” and “songbird”. Thus, symbolism enhanced realism, and its effect can be seen as positive in the sense that it stirred conscious awareness of values. The stage settings of A Doll’s House are an integral part f the theatrical design, and not mere dcor to be overlooked.

The setting in Act II; “the Christmas tree stands stripped of its decorations and with its candles burnt to stumps” is symbolic of the lack of happiness in Nora’s life at that moment. Also the change of setting in Act III; “The tables and chairs have been moved centre” foreshadows a character change that will take place in Nora. The many references to doors also have significance beyond the stage directions . The play begins with the opening of the door and finishes with the “slamming” of the door. Nora enters the doll’s house with the values of society and departs from it, symbolizing her rejection of them.

All these intricacies of play settings and characters depict realism on stage. Ultimately, it has been good for theatre because it presents the playwright’s ideas in interesting and original ways. Realism, as expressed through symbolism, also draws the attention of the audience, thus stimulating moral thought, and stirring reaction. Realism is also defined as art-imitating life (source). This is a fitting account of Anton Chekhov’s plays, for they tend to show the tagnant, helpless quality of Russian society in the late C19th.

Quite evident in The Three Sisters, when Tuzenbakh illustrates realism; “The suffering we see around us these days – and there’s plenty of it – is at least a sign that society has reached a certain moral level. ” Hence, while the portrayal of life here seemed ‘gloomy and pessimestic’, it was still good for theatre in that it presented issues which audiences could identify with. It was also more intellectual theatre when the playwright could express their views, compared with the conventional dramas that merely played out fiction.

Chekhov tends to portray people who are perpetually unsatisfied, such as Olga; “I felt my youth and energy draining away, drop by drop each day. Only one thing grows stronger and stronger, a certain longing. ” (Act 1). This is reflective of Chekhov’s realistic character work, where people dream to improve their lives, but most fail . Realism here effectively presents harsh realities onstage, and not having to promote idealistic ways of life. Reality is difficult as Olga expresses; “What is all this for? Why all this suffering?

The answer will e known one day, and then there will be no mysteries left, but till then, life must go on, we must work and work and think of nothing else. ” (Act IV). Chekhov also exposes human foibles and anti-social tendencies, such as with the character Natasha; “you have so many people here. I feel awfully nervousI am just not used to meeting new people. ” Thus, audiences can sympathize and identify with characters, as these traits are reflective of certain aspects of the human condition . So realism in theatre has been good in the respect that it has greater impact when there are elements of truth in the lay.

In the final analysis, the arrival of realism has been good for theatre primarily because it promoted greater audience involvement. While the portrayal of realistic issues may have been contentious in some cases, such as in A Doll’s House, it nevertheless stirred reaction, which encouraged moral thought. However, one could argue that its arrival has lead to less use of the imagination. In either case, realism has raised awareness of social and moral issues and the playwright’s views serve to challenge the audience ultimately making theatre more interactive and interesting.

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British Literature Wiki

Drama in the Twentieth Century

Table of contents.

Twentieth Century British Drama

“ Over time the desire to unsettle, to shock, even to alienate the audience became one hallmark of modern drama .” (Greenblatt 5)

Twentieth Century British theatre is commonly believed to have started in Dublin, Ireland with the foundation of the Irish Literary Theater by William B. Yeats , Lady Gregory, and J.M. Synge . (Greenblatt 1843) Their purpose was to provide a specifically Celtic and Irish venue that produced works that “stage[d] the deeper emotions of Ireland.” (The Abbey’s) The playwrights of the Irish Literary Theater (which later became the Abbey Theater, as it is known today) were part of the literary revival and included: Sean O’Casey , J.M. Synge , W.B. Yeats , Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn, to name a few. In England the well-made play genre was being rejected and replaced with actors and directors who were committed to bringing both reform and a serious audience to the theatre by appealing to the younger, socially conscious and politically alert crowd. In the plays by George Bernard Shaw , Harley Granville Barker, W. Somerset Maugham , and John Galsworthy , characters emulated this new crowd, satirized the well- made play characters, and created new stereotypes and new standards. (Chothia)

The early twentieth century denoted the split between ‘frocks and frills’ drama and serious works, following in the footsteps of many other European countries. “In Britain the impact of these continental innovations was delayed by a conservative theatre establishment until the late 1950s and 1960s when they converged with the counter-cultural revolution to transform the nature of English language theatre.” The West End, England’s Broadway, tended to produce the (Greenblatt 1844) musical comedies and well-made plays, while smaller theatres and Irish venues took a new direction. The new direction was political, satirical, and rebellious. Common themes in the new early 20th century drama were political, reflecting the unease or rebellion of the workers against the state, philosophical, delving into the who and why of human life and existence, and revolutionary, exploring the themes of colonization and loss of territory . They explored common societal business practices (conditions of factories), new political ideologies (socialism), or the rise of a repressed sector of the population (women).(Chothia) Industrialization also had an impact on Twentieth century drama, resulting in plays lamenting the alienation of humans in an increasingly mechanical world. Not only did Industrialization result in alienation; so did the wars. Between the wars, two types of theatre reined. In the West End, the middle class attended popular, conservative theatre dominated by Noël Coward and G.B. Shaw . “Commercial theatre thrived and at Drury Lane large budget musicals by Ivor Novello and Noel Coward used huge sets, extravagant costumes and large casts to create spectacular productions.” (West End) After the wars, taboos were broken and new writers, directors, and actors emerged with different views. Many played with the idea of reality, some were radically political, others shunned naturalism and questioned the legitimacy of previously unassailable beliefs. (Chothia) Towards the end of the century, the term ‘theatre of exorcism’ came into use due to the amount of plays conjuring the past in order to confront and accept it. Playwrights towards the end of the century count among their numbers: Samuel Beckett , Harold Pinter , Andrew Lloyd Webber, Brian Friel , Caryl Churchill , and Tom Stoppard . The last act of the century was a turn back towards realism as well as the founding of Europe’s first children’s cultural center.

For a year-by-year breakdown between 1895 and 1937, please click here .

Realism and Myth

Sigmund Freud inspired an interest in myth and dreams as playwrights became familiar with his studies of psychoanalysis. Along with the help of Carl Jung, the two psychiatrists influenced playwrights to incorporate myths into their plays. This integration allowed for new opportunities for playwrights to increase the boundaries of realism within their writing. As playwrights started to use myths in their writing, a “poetic form of realism” was created. This form of realism deals with truths that are widespread amongst all humans, bolstered by Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious.

Poetic Realism

Much of the poetic realism that was written during the beginning of the twentieth century focused on the portrayals of Irish peasant life. John Millington Synge , W.B. Yeats , and Lady Gregory were but a few writers to use poetic realism. Their portrayal of peasant life was often unappealing and many audiences reacted cruelly. Many plays that are poetically realistic often have unpleasant themes running through them, such as lust between a son and his step-mother or the murder of a baby to “prove” love. These plays used myths as a surrogate for real life in order to allow the audience to live the unpleasant plot without completely connecting to it.

The female characters progressed from the downtrodden, useless woman to an empowered, emancipated woman. They were used to to pose subversive questions about the social order. Many female characters portray the author’s masculine attitudes about women and their place in society. As time passed, though, females began gain empowerment. G.B. Shaw became one of the first English playwrights to follow Ibsen’s influence and create roles of real women. Mrs. Warren, Major Barbara, and Pygmalion all have strong female leads. Women first started voting in 1918. Later in the century, females (and males) were both subjected to the alienation of society and routinely were not given names to suggest to the audience the character’s worth within the play.

Political Theatre and War

Political theatre uses the theatre to represent “how a social or political order uses its power to ‘represent’ others coercively.” It uses live performances and often shows the power of politics through “demeaning and limiting” prejudices. Political theatre often represents many different types of groups that are often stereotyped – “women, gay men, lesbians, ethnic and racial groups, [and] the poor.” Political theatre is used to express one’s political ideas. Agitprop, a popular form of political theatre, even had its roots in the 1930s women’s rights movement. Propaganda played a big role in political theater, whether it be in support of a war or in opposition of political schemes, theater played a big role in influencing the public. The wars also affected the early theatre of the twentieth century. The consternation before WWI produced the Dada movement, the predecessor to Surrealism and Expressionism.

Types of Modern Drama

Realism, in theater, was meant to be a direct observation of human behavior. It began as a way to make theater more useful to society, a way to hold a mirror up to society. Because of this thrust towards the “real” playwrights started using more contemporary settings, backgrounds and characters. Where plays in the past had, for the most part, used mythological or stereotypical characters, now they involved the lower class, the poor, the rich; they involved all genders, classes and races. One of the main contributors to this style was Henrik Ibsen.

Social Realism

Social Realism began showing up in plays during the 1930s. This realism had a political conscience behind it because the world was in a depression. These plays painted a harsh picture of rural poverty. The drama began to aim at showing governments the penalties of unrestrained capitalism and the depressions that lax economies created. One of the main contributors to this style was G.B. Shaw .

Avant Garde Theatre

“Dramatic truth couldn’t be found in the tangibleness of realistic drama, but in symbols, images, legends, myths, fantasies, and dreams” (Klaus)

Absurdist Drama

Absurdist Drama was existentialist theatre which put a direct perception of a mode of being above all abstract considerations. It was also essentially a poetic, lyrical theatre for the expression of intuitions of being through movement, situations and concrete imagery. Language was generally downplayed. (Barnet) Symbolism, Dadaism and their offspring, Surrealism, Theatre of Cruelty, and Expressionism all fall into this category.

Dadaism, or Dada, was a reaction against WWI. Like many of the movements, Dada included writing, painting and poetry as well as theatre. Many Dadaists wrote manifestos detailing their beliefs, which normally outlined their disgust in colonialism and nationalism and tried to be the opposite of the the current aesthetics and values. The more Dada offended, the better. It was considered to be (by Dadaists), the ‘anti-art’. It rejected the values of society and turned everything on its head, preferring to disgust and offend.

Symbolism/Aestheticism

In England, Symbolism was also known as Aestheticism. A very stylized format of drama, wherein dreams and fantasies were common plot devices, Aestheticism was used by numerous playwrights from Yeats to Pinter. The staging was highly stylized, usually using minimal set pieces and vague blocking. While the playwrights who could be considered Aestheticists lived and worked at the beginning of the century, it influenced all of the following styles.

Like Aestheticism, Surrealism has its base in the mystical. It developed the physicality of theatre and downplayed words, hoping to influence its audiences through action. Other common characteristics of surreal plays are unexpected comparisons and surprise. The most famous British playwright in the 20s surrealist style is Samuel Beckett . Theatre of Cruelty is a subset of surrealism and was motivated by an idea of Antonin Artaud. It argues the idea that theatre is a “representational medium” and tried to bring current ideas and experiences to the audience through participation and “ritualistic theater experiments.” Artaud thought that theatre should present and represent equally. This type of theatre relies deeply on metaphors and rarely included a description of how it could be performed.

Expressionism

The term ‘Expressionism’ was first coined in Germany in 1911. (Michaelides) Expressionism also had its hey-day during the 20s although it had two distinct branches. The branches had characters speaking in short, direct sentences or in long, lyrical expanses. This type of theatre usually did not name the characters and spend much time lamenting the present and warning against the future. Spiritual awakenings and episodic structures were also fairly common.

Epic Theatre

Epic theater was created by Bertold Brecht who rejected realistic theatre. He found that such plays were too picture-perfect. Epic Theatre is based on Greek Epic poetry. There are dramatic illusions such as “stark, harsh lighting, blank stages, placards announcing changes of scenes, bands playing music onstage, and long, discomfiting pauses” (Jacobus). Brecht believed that drama should be made within its audiences and he thought that Epic Theatre drama would reinforce the realities that people were facing rather than challenge them. Epic Theatre helped to preserve the social issues that they portrayed.

Physical Advances

To hear Yale University’s Maynard Mack describe some differences between Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and today’s theatre, click HERE .

Architecture

In the late nineteenth century, early twentieth century, theatre architecture changed from hosting as many audience members as possible without regarding their needs to creating better acoustical, visual, and spatial arrangements for both actors and audience members. Whereas before, theatres were cylindrical shaped, in the twentieth century fan-shaped auditoriums were favored. Audiences liked them because of

the clear sight-lines and favorable acoustics and actors liked them because the natural style of acting that was becoming more popular was conducive to smaller venues. (Klaus)

There was also a renewed interest in the earlier forms of staging such as the thrust and arena stages (theatre-in-the-round). The theatre that most audiences are used to are like the pictured Olivier Theate. Everyone has basically the same view of the stage and the stage itself is viewed through the Proscenium arch, which acts as a picture frame surrounding the stage and framing the play. The Proscenium arch may be anything from a gilded, brightly lit masterpiece surrounding the curtain at the beginning of a show to the simple black walls preventing you from seeing into the wings of the theatre. In a Proscenium theatre, the action takes place either behind the Proscenium or slightly in front of it, on what is known as the apron of a stage. (The piece closest to the audience and which the curtain generally does not hide.) In a thrust theatre, the action takes place almost completely in front of the ‘Proscenium arch’, if indeed there is one. The audience is seated on three sides of the stage and many of these types of theatres make great use of entrances and exits by the hallways through the audience. An arena stage has audience seating on all four sides and has four entrances/exits called vomitoria. (from the Latin ‘vomitorium’ meaning (generally): [an audience] spews forth from them). In today’s American culture, arena stages (and vomitoria) are most commonly found as sports arena.

Found Space is another recycled theatrical convention. The term ‘Found Space’ refers to streets, personal homes, a grocery store, anywhere that is not specifically designated as a theatre.

The set in a theatre is the background upon which the story is told. It can be anything from a very detailed box set (explained below) to absolutely nothing. The set can be physical platforms and walls or it can be projections on sheets.

The box set, or three walls designed to look like the interior of a house, complete with doors, windows and furniture, figured prominently in most, if not all, of the plays performed in the modern realistic tradition at the beginning of the 20th Century. (Klaus)

Before the invention of the electric light bulb in 1879, theatres used either gas or carbon arc lamps. Both gas and carbon arc lamps were

prone to fires. Numerous theatres had switched to the carbon arc lamp during the 1840s, but since the concept of the arc lamp is to send voltage through the open air, there was still a high chance of fire. The Savoy in London was the first public building to operate completely on electricity. In 1882, a year after the Savoy opened, the Munich Exposition displayed an electrified theatre, marking the beginning of a general change-over to electricity-lit theatres. Existing theatres that already had gas lines repurposed them by threading wires through the old gas lines and inserting a row of light bulbs in front of the gas jets.

Unfortunately, electricity had quite a few drawbacks. The set designers or scenographers (combination set designer/costume designer)

did not adapt to the new medium, creating sets that were unsuited to electric light placement. A second drawback was that electricity itself was very dangerous and electricians were hard to find. It might not be as dangerous as gas, but there was still the chance of fire. The front boards, also known as control panels (see above), were live, with handles that could be in an ‘on’ or ‘off’ position. The ‘on’ position did not have protection of any sort, and if the operator was not careful, he or she could die. In the photo to the left, technology had advanced enough for fuses. The third drawback to electricity was that it required a lot of power. Theatres often had to own the generators powering their theatres.

Gordon Craig, a British actor, director,producer, and scenic designer made invaluable contributions to lighting. Instead of putting most of his lights at the foot of the stage (known as footlights or floaters), he hung lighting instruments above the stage. He, along with Adolphe Appia of Switzerland, also realized the dramatic potential of lighting, playing with color and form. Appia also established the first goals of stage lighting in his books: La Mise en scène du drame Wagnérien or The Staging of the Wagnerian Drama and L’Oeuvre d’art vivant (1921) or The Living Work of Art . (Adolphe) (1895)

An American named Jean Rosenthal created the post of ‘lighting designer’ within the theatre world. Before her career in the 1950s, either the master electrician or the set designer would light the play. After her integral designs with the Martha Graham Dance Company and on Broadway, the position of Lighting Designer was added to the production staff. Many designers today credit her with specific lighting techniques and lovingly refer to her as the Mother of Stage Lighting. (Wild)

Advances on the Continent and their Impact on British Drama

Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s plays were first translated and performed in England in London, 1888. His startling Real-ist drama jumpstarted modern British drama. “His… serious drama based on moral and social issues hung over what has been called ‘the minority theatre [the ‘Off-Broadway of England]’” (Smart). Ibsen and Frenchman André Antoine pioneered the era of naturalistic drama that later snuck into England through writers in the early 20th Century.

In Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, became the first modern director. He enjoyed plays so much that he built a stage, hired actors, had scripts written, and (because he financed it) told everyone what they should do. His productions eventually became the Meiningen Ensemble and toured Europe and England extensively, profoundly altering the actor/director, manger/director or writer/director mindset of the past.

In Russia, Constantin Stanislavski organized the ideas of the Duke of Saxe Meiningen and of André Antoine into the Stanislavski Method of acting. Stanislavski brought the Eastern belief in dedication to the trade (some Japanese actors spend 30 years developing their craft (Worthen)) to the Western world. The Stanislavski Method states that the actor’s primary goal is to be believed. It tells the actor that s/he must use his or her own memories to evoke emotions. The Western world accepted this view and used this method to teach it’s actors for many 20th Century realist actors, although towards the 1990s this method has fallen out of vogue.(American, Sawoski)

Antonin Artaud was a contemporary of Samuel Beckett ‘s. He created what is known as the Theatre of Cruelty .

British Playwrights in the Twentieth Century

• J. M. Barrie
• Samuel Beckett
• Caryl Churchill
• Noël Coward
• Brian Friel
• John Galsworthy
• W. Somerset Maugham
• Sean O’Casey
• Harold Pinter
• Peter Shaffer
• George Bernard Shaw
• Tom Stoppard
• John Millington Synge
• William B. Yeats

Back to The Twentieth Century

• The Abbey’s Cultural Role and Value. Abbey Theatre. Web. 15 May 2010.
• “Adolphe Appia.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 17 May. 2010 < http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/30582/Adolphe-Appia >.
• “American Masters . Constantin Stanislavsky.” PBS. Web. 16 May 2010. < http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/stanislavsky_c.html >.
• Ballard, James. “The Independent Theatre Movement in Europe and the Influence of Henrik Ibsen.” Diss. Web. 15 May 2010. < http://infiniterooms.co.uk/pdf/dissertationfull.pdf >.
• Barnet, Sylvan, Morton Berman, and William Burto. “New Form in the Theatre.” Types of Drama: Plays and Essays. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981. 776-779. Print.
• Chothia, Jean. “English Drama of the Early Modern Period, 1890-1940.” London: Longman, 1996. Print.
• Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. “Twentieth Century Drama.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 1843-847. Print.
• Jacobus, Lee A. “The Rise of Realism.” The Bedford Introduction to Drama. Boston: Bedford of St. Martin’s, 1993. 801-808. Print.
• Klaus, Carl H., Miriam Gilbert, and Bradford S. Field. “Modern/Contemporary Theatre.” Stages of Drama: Classical to Contemporary Theater. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1999. 507+.
• Markus, Tom, and Linda Sarver. Another Opening, Another Show: a Lively Introduction to the Theatre. Boston, Mass.: McGraw-Hill, 2005. Print.
• Michaelides, Chris. “Chronology of the European Avant Garde, 1900 – 1937.” Www.bl.uk/breakingtherules . Dec. 2007. Web. 10 June 2011. < http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/features/breakingtherules/images/AvantGardeChronology.pdf >.
• Morash, Chris. “Babel, 1972 — 2000.” A History of Irish Theatre, 1601-2000. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 242-71.
• Sawoski, Perviz. “The Stanislavski System Growth and Methodology.” 2nd Ed. Web. 16 May 2010. < https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/files//2018/06/Stanislavski.pdf >.
• Smart, John. “Twentieth Century British Drama.” Jstor. University of Delaware, 2001. Web. 15 May 2010
• “theatre.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 17 May. 2010 < http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/590239/theatre >.
• Worthen, William B. “Chapter 1-9.” The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. 5th ed. Boston, Mass.: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2007. 1-100. Print.
• Bandhu, Pun. “What Is ‘avant-garde’ Theater? Styles Of Plays (The Broadway Producer).” Videojug – Get Good At Life. The World’s Best How to Videos plus Free Expert Advice and Tutorials. The Broadway Producer, 2006. Web. 10 June 2011. < http://www.videojug.com/expertanswer/styles-of-plays-2/what-is-avant-garde-theater >.
• “West End Theatre between the Wars – Victoria and Albert Museum.” West End Theatre between the Wars . V&A Home Page – Victoria and Albert Museum. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. < http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/w/west-end-theatre-between-the-wars/ >.
• Wild, Larry. “Jean Rosenthal 1912-1969.” Jean Rosenthal 1912-1969 . Northern State University, 18 Oct. 2011. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. < http://www3.northern.edu/wild/jr.htm >.

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27 The Evolution of American Dramatic Realism

Eileen J. Herrmann is a modern American drama scholar. She coedited, with Robert Dowling, Jr., Eugene O’Neill and His Early Contemporaries. Her articles appear in the Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, the Eugene O’Neill Review, Theatre History Studies, and the Journal of American Studies. She serves on the boards of the Eugene O’Neill Society and the Eugene O’Neill Foundation.

• Published: 12 August 2019
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Realism in American drama has proved its resiliency from its inception at the end of the nineteenth century to its transformation into modern theater in the twentieth century. This chapter delineates the evolution of American realistic drama from the influence of European theater and its adaptation by American artists such as James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers. Flexible enough to admit the expressionistic techniques crafted by Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill and leading to the “subjective realism” of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, realism has provided a wide foundation for subsequent playwrights such as David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard to experiment with its form and language.

The American theater embraces realism as measured by the training methods of its conservatories and drama departments and as seen in the repertoire of major professional theaters; realism’s resiliency is due to its elasticity and malleability. The arc of American dramatic realism spans from its continental and American origins to native playwrights poised to experiment with the form, reflecting a modern psychological sensibility and linguistic sophistication. The result is a stylistically eclectic theater, filled with stories that adhere to the probable, relying on neither overt fantasy nor excessive theatricality.

As an artistic movement beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, realism was a broad and multipronged global reaction against the status quo and the bourgeoisie, as well as the idealism and imaginary worlds of late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century romanticism. By staging observations from ordinary life, realists rebelled against the strong emotions and simplified moral universe of good and evil embodied in stock characterizations—emblematic of melodrama and the romantic theater.

Dramatic realism, “an arrangement of practices developed as part of a cultural milieu of which we are still a part,” is “notoriously elusive” (Worthen 14). From its inception, realism appeared to be an inadequate vehicle to sustain a critique of the forces of modern life, which, at that moment, were more in sync with naturalism. Indeed, dramatic realism was—and continues to be—conflated with naturalism, terms often used interchangeably to refer to a method of acting that accurately represents reality. Realism has also been set in opposition to experimental or avant-garde theater, though experiments with realism have been wide-ranging. Realism is also sometimes thought to be the same as “kitchen-sink realism,” disparaged by, for example, Tennessee Williams and John Guare, who note the tension between surface reality (as symbolized by a kitchen sink) and inner reality (Mitchell).

A stronger understanding of dramatic realism distances the form from a surface-like presentation of reality and acknowledges that the seeds of its evolution lay in its origins. Early in his career, Eugene O’Neill distinguished “truly realistic” plays from the realism that only deals with the “appearance of things,” ignoring the character’s soul, foreshadowing the psychological realism to follow (Bogard 183–184). As witnessed by the long and variegated playwriting of those recognized realists O’Neill, Williams, and Miller, realism is neither confining nor limited.

Realism’s breadth is also seen in the disparate playwriting of Lorraine Hansberry and Edward Albee, who responded in starkly dissimilar ways to the complacency of 1950s Eisenhower America. Both write realistically, with recognizable verisimilitude. Yet the social realism of Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (1959) is vastly different from Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), which destabilized the boundaries between domestic realism and the experimentalism of the avant-garde by incorporating the nonreal.

Defining Dramatic Realism

Dramatic realism is often juxtaposed with naturalism, which emphasizes the struggle for survival and the overwhelming physiological, psychological, and economic connections between character and environment, impairing one’s ability to exercise free decision-making. Like naturalists, realists embrace unpleasant and shocking themes and depict ordinary, or even less than honorable (but identifiable) characters who confront life in all its untidy complexity. Unlike naturalists, realists allow for a measure of free choice, an idea that particularly resonates with American audiences.

John Gassner proposes a realism wide and flexible enough to capture humanity’s essence, to penetrate the mind and spirit, and to plumb the depths of individual psyches in which the nonreal and the illogical take part. Gassner argues that realism should never “make a virtue of prose dialogue and of near-facsimile reproductions of life as if spectators looked into somebody’s apartment” (471).

The sometimes bad reputation that realism receives comes from its not being understood as multifaceted and as not having evolved from the days of David Belasco, impresario, director, producer, and self-proclaimed “realist.” Known for his flashy productions, thin plot lines, and overwrought scenery, Belasco had a sense of realism that was photographic, going to extreme lengths to give the audience “realism”—in script, scenery, and acting. In an often-cited example from his production of The Governor’s Lady (1912), he reproduced the well-known Childs’ Restaurant onstage with the famed Childs’ pancakes being cooked during the action. But, as Robert Dowling points out, Belasco “misconstrued naturalism,” and realism, “when he went directly to nature for his inspiration” (429).

At its outset, realism relied on the probable that governs everyday existence, and thus, realism is rooted in causality—Henrik Ibsen’s drama, for example, presented an unbreakable chain of cause-and-effect actions, disavowing coincidences. In such realistic plotting, the action is unified in time and place, continuous and concentrated, free of changing locales and complicated plots. Plot is secondary to character; characters emanate primarily from the middle class, are clothed in “authentic” costumes, and act on stages located largely indoors, thus reflecting ordinary life. Often, topics from contemporary life and society dominate, rather than those from some idealized past. Frequently, a protagonist rises up to assert himself or herself against an injustice (see Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House ). Theatricality is absent and dialogue never heightened; characters communicate in everyday colloquial speech—ungrammatical, fragmentary, frank, employing dialects.

Though a retrospective look at realism in its early stages reveals the common elements enumerated above, the form is now protean in subject matter, form, and language—responsive to individual playwrights who write within a realistic format yet who also bend the form. Today some playwrights create dramas that incorporate traditional realistic components in varying degrees. What remains true about today’s realism is that realists work within the realm of probability, establish familiar relationships with their audiences, and minimize theatricality; realism continues its focus on the middle class and its domestic center: home and family.

Today’s realists often inject a limited amount of expressionism and symbolism; indeed, a play can still be “realistic” even as it absorbs stylistic elements. Also, characters emanate not just from different social strata but also from different countries, a diversity that may extend to dialogue—in other languages. Realists continue to reflect reality faithfully, but “even the dialogue of ‘superrealistic’ drama is extremely artificial when compared to actual human conversation”—a rose can never be “just a rose” (Richardson 3). Thus, delivering a perfect transparent linguistic window into the “real” is understandably entirely dependent on the playwright as reflected in the “word jazz” of David Mamet, the metaphoric storytelling of August Wilson, and the unstable, postmodern language of Sam Shepard. Finally, realism is not a monolithic, homogeneous entity, but it reflects the multifaceted diversity of the physical world conjoined to the universal experiences common to humanity.

Indeed, metaphor is frequently associated with realistic drama; since the role of metaphor is to convey the inexpressible vividly in everyday words, a metaphorically rich play is able to capture what is real and present yet luminous—neither easily discernible nor easily experienced (Ortony 19–43). Always, the challenge of realistic playwrights is to reflect the interplay between a “life” we can all agree upon and that “life” which defies fixity. Thus, many realistic plays work on two levels: simultaneously significant in conveying reality on a real-time basis in order to affirm the “truth” of this world, they also rise to metaphoric heights, conferring a universal significance upon the smallest particular occurrence. And, while aware of their cultural moment, realistic playwrights respond to the ideas of their time while also distinguishing between those ideas “more real” versus those more indeterminate.

Continental Patterns in Realism: The Influence of Henrik Ibsen, Anton Chekhov, and August Strindberg (1860–1910)

Henrik Ibsen contributed the “social problem” play to realism’s rise, posing complex and universal questions of society and humanity. He focused on the “truths” of his Norwegian bourgeois society and the institutions upon which those truths rested (church, civil life, law). His playwriting was interrogative: Without the spirit of truth and freedom—the “pillars of society”—can a society continue? What is marriage when it reflects an imbalance of power? Absent both villains and heroes, Ibsen’s plays create characters who need to be rescued from the social and moral system. His questioning is metaphorical, unlimited by time or place, applicable to any society that demands conformity to its values, suppresses the individual, and sets up barriers against living. The forces and frictions of domestic life are relevant not just to Nora in A Doll’s House but to all women trapped by societal norms.

Ibsen’s plays progress logically in a cause-and-effect manner, following the pattern of the well-made play. Stylistically, Ibsen was the master at injecting realistic details into his characters, establishing their appearance, movement, and speech. We understand Nora through her childish joy in a Christmas tree, in the look of her dress, in her pleasure in eating macaroons. Ibsen was instrumental in providing a window into the lives of dramatic characters, capturing truth through language; his characters revealed themselves through dialogue, and he maintained their consistency (i.e., only the clever made clever statements). He avoided the soliloquy and the aside, thus maintaining the fourth wall of the set. He provided bits of characters’ private conversations and mannerisms of speech, which were often delivered flat, to suggest imprisonment. Conversation in an Ibsen play had to be believed within a certain setting and context, advancing the action as each speech emphasized, modified, or altered the audience’s perception of what went before (Murphy 37). Critical to the development of American realism, Ibsen left a heavy imprint on American theater and influenced, among many, Sophie Treadwell, James A. Herne, Rachel Crothers, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, David Mamet, and Wendy Wasserstein.

Anton Chekhov eschewed Ibsen’s logical well-made play with its strong plotting and striking events. Trained as a physician and with a meticulous concern for truth, Chekhov advocated that writers be documentarians, observers of life, neither manipulating nor distorting reality. His plays focused on revealing the inner meanings of human emotions and the rich, submerged psychological landscape that characters traverse; his form of writing necessitated a new form of actor preparation—which would later achieve acclaim as the Stanislavsky system—focused on “inner realism” and the actor’s intuition (Styan, Modern Drama 79).

Chekhov’s “structure” is embedded within the psychological realism of his characters—Russian aristocrats in the last days of tsarist Russia are finely drawn and symbolized in The Cherry Orchard as cherry trees in full bloom surrounding a crumbling manor house. Nina and Konstantin ( The Sea Gull ); Olga, Masha, and Irinia ( The Three Sisters ); Vanya ( Uncle Vanya ); and the characters grappling with the loss of the cherry orchard collectively testify to living life in a world without spiritual belief. Yet they remain individuals. Some are bored, and others more keenly feel their futile existence. They hint, they suggest, they are ironic, incongruous, and contradictory, leaving it to others to make meaning of their lives. Chekhov is attentive to the delicate details of their behavior, their gestures and movements. He describes their finely perceived elements of speech (Styan, “Chekhov’s Dramatic Technique” 107). His dramatic surface is filled with non sequiturs and pauses, of centrifugal incidents and tangential comments.

Chekhov only allusively critiqued the last days of his tsarist Russian society. Indeed, Russia’s ills were meaningless to him, except for the weight they placed on the lives of his characters. As Trofimov says to the aristocrat Anya in Act II of The Cherry Orchard : “All Russia is our orchard. It is a great and beautiful land, and there are many wonderful places in it. … Your grandfather … and all your ancestors were serf-owners, possessors of living souls. Don’t you see that from every cherry tree, from every leaf and trunk, human beings are peering out at you? Don’t you hear their voices?” (804).

Beyond his nuanced psychological characterization, emotional overtones, and subtext, Chekhov changed American theater through the influence of his “open” form, placing the onus of decoding the events onstage on the spectators, requiring them to draw their own conclusions and meaning (Esslin 142). Many American playwrights absorbed the ramifications of Chekhov’s style, including Williams, Inge, Odets, and Henley.

While Chekhov’s influence on American drama is pervasive, he was not in open rebellion against dramatic form as was the “Swedish sensationalist” August Strindberg. Robert Brustein argues that alongside naturalism, symbolism, and expressionism, realism is just another “ism” to disguise that modern drama is in revolt; the modern dramatist “adopts the posture of the rebel, chafing against restraints, determined to make all barriers crack” (vii, 8). Strindberg was just such a rebel.

In his foreword to Miss Julie , Strindberg calls for a modern, complex psychological drama, including “characters who do not perform in a stereotypical or predictable way, but who vacillate, act on unconscious impulses, are products of genetics and environment; he congratulates himself on his characters’ multiple motives” (Haverty Rugg 12). Rather than focusing on plot, Strindberg centered his drama on the contradictory ways in which people behave and think (Manheim 15, 64). He concluded that human motivation seemed “a matter of erratic whims and obsessions rather than of fixed psychological law” and that there are multiple motives for any single action—some physiological, some psychological, some attributable to the times and culture in which a character lives and is envisioned (Reinert 15).

In Miss Julie , Strindberg portrays the Darwinian law of “survival of the fittest” animating the psychological warfare between Jean, a representative of the servant class, and Julie, a count’s daughter. Accidental circumstances throw the two together, leading to Miss Julie’s seduction and eventual suicide, the reason for which ultimately remains unclear. Was her suicide prompted by a fear that her relationship with Jean would be discovered by the returning count? Or due to the shame she feels for having betrayed her class? Or did she realize her class had also betrayed her? (Manheim 60–61).

In Jean, Julie sees the young romantic who idealized her as an adolescent when he spied her walking among the roses in her pink dress and white stockings. Then their different social backgrounds were not critical for either Jean or Julie. As a boy, Jean saw a princess to be won. Now, however, Jean is an older, upwardly mobile servant/superman, resentful of the aristocracy and contemptuous of his debasement of his mistress. Both Jean and Julie remain individuals and yet represent characters reflecting their historical moment. For Strindberg, Julie is “a remnant of the old warrior aristocracy, which is now going down and giving place to a new aristocracy of nerve and brain” (qtd. in Lamm 115). Further, Strindberg presents Julie as a victim of biology and heredity, enfeebled by her tendency toward hysteria and impetuousness, as well as her sensual desires.

By suggesting the complex psychological, historical, and biological forces constituting an individual’s consciousness, Strindberg connected the public with the inner private lives of his characters and provided a larger foundation on which to build character. His contribution to psychological realism was the depth he infused into his characters’ motivation, an influence visible in the work of O’Neill and Williams.

Realism in the United States (1890–1910)

Due to Ibsen’s increasing notoriety in the United States, coinciding with the dramatic criticism of William Dean Howells and Henry James, realism gained surer footing in the American theater in the late nineteenth century. Brenda Murphy points out that through their essays and theater reviews, Howells and James were “forced to articulate realism’s aesthetic principles”—albeit imprecisely (2). Howells, chief spokesperson for American realism, stressed that a play must illustrate or reproduce life and that realism must be specific to time and place and the objects of observation. Unlike Howells, James placed greater emphasis on the details of theatrical representation, but he agreed with Howells that dramatic realism should imitate real life in a natural and “quiet” way, catching the substance of the human spectacle (Murphy 24–31).

Aware of realism’s dramatic possibilities, playwrights James A. Herne and Rachel Crothers applied the principles of realism at a time when others—Clyde Fitch, August Thomas, Belasco—only skimmed the surface of realism and when the theater-going public was still paying to see sentimental melodramas. Herne, the “American Ibsen,” called in 1897 for more serious plays native to America, a truthful realism to replace melodrama. In his “Art for Truth’s Sake in the Drama,” Herne said, “I stand for truth’s sake because it perpetuates the everyday life of its time, because it develops the latent beauty of the so-called commonplaces of life, because it dignifies labor and reveals the divinity of the common man” (qtd. in Murphy 27–28). Herne provided American drama with an example of Ibsen’s realism, “an unflinching, objective, unsentimental analysis of a contemporary social problem,” in his most famous play, Margaret Fleming (1890), which Howells called “epoch making” (qtd. in Edwards and Herne 57). Here a high-minded wife reconciles herself to her husband’s infidelity and accepts responsibility for his illegitimate child. Vexing his critics, Herne exposed the double standard in marriage. The play is grim and bleak but refuses to make large moral judgments about the unthinking sensualist husband; rather, it captures a society in flux and portrays Margaret as a complicated woman, working to shape her environment. Absent of theatricality and the usual obtrusive exposition—the aside and the soliloquy— Margaret Fleming broke barriers and provided a way for dramatists to write realistically about gender equality. The play’s break with dramatic convention frustrated Herne’s effort to produce it, and Margaret Fleming received only limited performances from 1890 to 1892.

Crothers, the most prolific woman dramatist of the twentieth century and author of thirty-four plays, gave voice to the evolving “New Woman.” Crothers’s “character drama” presented consciously realistic, psychological portraits of women caught in society, wrestling with the social forces that confine them to their environment and limit their aspirations. In The Three of Us (1906), Crothers presents a fearless woman determined not to marry; after being placed in a compromising situation not of her making, she freely chooses marriage but only after insisting that she be trusted. In A Man’s World (1909), Crothers, in Ibsen-like fashion, exposes the shame of illegitimacy and the double standard governing the sexes. Here Crothers morally vindicates the choice made by Frank Ware, an intellectual and an artist who has adopted a man’s name so that her work will be taken seriously. When Frank discovers that Malcolm Gaskell, her fiancé, abandoned the mother of the boy Frank is currently raising, she asks him to morally agree that his treatment of the woman was wrong; he refuses, and Frank breaks their engagement.

Crothers’s scrutiny of the double standard holding women, not men, accountable in sexual matters is reminiscent of Ibsen’s “social problem” playwriting and of Herne’s Margaret Fleming . Crothers represents the psychological conflict and dilemma of the New Woman seeking a sense of her own identity and freedom but limited by the social forces shaping her aspirations and beliefs. In addition to A Man’s World, Crothers’s New Woman onstage, a new variety of female character, is the focus of The Three of Us, Myself Bettina (1908), He and She (1911), Ourselves (1913), and Young Wisdom (1914), among others. Lois Gottlieb argues that Crothers’s “feminist heroine is far more comfortable with her strength than earlier heroines, is consciously motivated by her desire to help other women break out of boundaries, and is explicit in her belief in women’s evolution and its beneficial impact on society” (7). Yet when Crothers portrays the “competition the woman artist faces between creativity and the ‘natural’ duties of motherhood,” some feminist critics consider her subject matter dated, “the product of an earlier ladylike generation,” especially when her protagonist chooses home over career (Eisenhauer 133, 118–119). They critique her playwriting for reinforcing the status quo and realism’s linear causality, a relation in which one event produces another event; however, Crothers’s strength remains her questioning of the social position of American women vis-à-vis a society limiting their potential.

Experimental Realism: The Provincetown Players (1915–1922)

Because commercial theaters required plays with conventional plots to satisfy the audience’s desire to see star players in plays structured to feature them in every scene, Broadway theaters weren’t receptive to dramatic innovation. Early in the twentieth century, dramatists, stage designers, and actors, influenced by nineteenth-century European theater, the theories of German director Max Reinhardt, and the stage designs of Adolphe Appia and Gordon Craig, began to call for a theater free from the vestiges of melodrama and commercial interests, resulting in the alternative theater movement in the United States. The Provincetown Players (1915–1922) became the most notable of these “little theater” groups and the embodiment of a new ideal: a modernist aesthetic expressiveness demanding present-day originality and a theatricality expressing the inner life of characters.

The Provincetown Players, a group of nonconforming artists and intellectuals, provided a laboratory for playwrights to experiment with subject matter, style, and production methods. Inspired by the Dionysian enthusiasm of its founder, George Cram “Jig” Cook, their mission was to stage American plays and boldly experiment with a wide variety of theatrical styles—realism, expressionism, and symbolism—within a single performance (Sarlos 5–6). The group produced ninety-seven new plays by forty-seven authors, including more plays by women writers than any other theater of the time; the Players established the careers of O’Neill and Susan Glaspell.

The Players’ key modernist principle was its focus on psychological expressiveness, both thematically and stylistically—an expressiveness not opposed to the realism of their continental or American predecessors. Indeed, the majority of the Players thought it experimental to present plays with potent political themes and plays focused on women, as well as on the plight of lower- and middle-class Americans and immigrants, in psychologically “charged” drama. And, Christopher Innes adds, “simply presenting a sequence of actions in a temporal and spatial frame, the Players invoked a narrative frame reliant on realism” (131).

Only a few of the Players radically modified the idea of aesthetic order or wrote with the avant-garde in mind. Others, like O’Neill, favored realism; indeed, O’Neill often relied on realistic stage sets for his plays. Despite the protests of artists who constructed abstract or art deco sets and cubist scenery for other Provincetown playwrights, O’Neill resisted, says William Zorach, a sculptor and painter: “Gene insisted everything had to be factual. If the play called for a stove, it couldn’t be a paint box” (qtd. in Egan 6). The experimental efforts of all the Provincetown Players helped marry expressionism with realism.

Susan Glaspell

From 1916 to 1922, the Provincetown Players produced eleven plays by Glaspell, whose psychologically arresting playwriting explored modern themes. Ranging from the ironic realism of Suppressed Desires (1915), Trifles (1916), Woman’s Honor (1918), and Inheritors (1921) to her most expressionistic play, The Verge (1921), Glaspell, radicalized by Progressive Era social movements, subverted the pattern of female submission. Her most consistent theme was the drive of her largely female protagonists to escape the roles thrust upon them by society.

Stylistically linked to the experiments of Strindberg, especially in The Verge , Glaspell’s work also reflected Ibsen’s socially conscious playwriting and the domestic struggles of Crothers’s women. Crothers’s direct influence on Glaspell is uncertain; however, it is likely that Glaspell was well aware of her work (Eisenhauer 117). Ibsen’s influence is more certain: as with Ibsen, the direction in a Glaspell work is outward, from the confining circle of society to the freedom of the outside.

Glaspell’s plays do not easily figure into realism’s rubric as defined in its infancy. As a Midwestern writer—trained as a reporter—she produced works that are more “incoherent in regionalist realist terms, seemingly chaotic but … powerful accounts of the unspeakable—of passion” and intense feeling (Papke 23). Yet the stark realism of life in a lonely farmhouse permeates Trifles , and its compressed plotting is based on an actual murder story Glaspell covered as a reporter in Iowa, solved in the play with a collection of clues pieced together by two women who, at play’s end, form a sisterhood to conceal evidence in an act of solidarity.

Known for its accurate, detailed presentation, Glaspell’s language is concrete and significant, convincing in detail, and spiritually cumulative. Glaspell connected language to action: her women characters are inarticulate; they pause, stammer, and ultimately stumble toward some understanding of themselves. On the other hand, the men are often glib and verbally dexterous, reflecting a patriarchal society in which men reign. While the men in Trifles are never at a loss for words, the women must painfully—almost mutely—grope toward some apprehension of the motive for the murder that has taken place.

Eugene O’Neill

Critics separate O’Neill’s career into phases. First was his naturalistic/realistic period (1914–1918), when he portrayed psychologically restricted and environmentally encapsulated characters. Next, in his experimental years (1920–1931), he objectified inner experience, necessitating a more stylistically experimental theater, including innovations in space, sound, and language, as well as the use of masks, interior monologues, choral hymns, primitive dreams, and an imitation of the Greek theater. His theatricality, while present throughout this period, enhances the story and does not dominate—even in his most expressionistic plays ( The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape ). In the last phase of his career, after three Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize, O’Neill returned to realism in his most critically acclaimed plays, The Iceman Cometh (1939), Long Day’s Journey into Night (1941), and A Moon for the Misbegotten (1941–1943). In these plays, O’Neill rid himself of all theatricality and ceased experimentation, returning to the realistic mode.

While these broad divisions are useful, O’Neill’s oeuvre cannot be so neatly understood. For example, how can one understand Anna Christie ? Is it romantically realistic with a naturalist bent? And how does Anna Christie differ from the naturalism of Diff’rent or the reliance on expressionism in The Emperor Jones , all three written in 1920? A more accurate analysis of O’Neill’s career is that from beginning to end, he did not relate to any “ism” but freely borrowed from realism, naturalism, and expressionism to achieve his form of psychological and social realism, which he dubbed “supernaturalism,” a deeper poetic art that would be more emotionally authentic to approximate an “inner vision of spiritual reality” (Bryer 68).

O’Neill’s quarrel with realism, even as he was expanding its parameters, was that rather than focusing on life’s surface, drama should be “spiritually true, not meticulously life-like—an interpretation of actuality by a distillation, an elimination of most realistic trappings, an intensification of human lives into clear symbols of truth” (O’Neill 175). Realism in its early stages—the theater of Belasco, without the psychological underpinning and the tragic struggle—did not appeal to O’Neill, who was more interested in exploring man’s tragic connection to God in a world absent of belief.

O’Neill’s supernaturalism was more akin to what Timo Tiusanen refers to as “dynamic realism,” resembling the movements of the psyche (278). His realism technically included poetic stage directions, audible thoughts, extended silences, offstage sounds, repetitious phrases, metaphoric words, and symbolism (Törnqvist 34). While O’Neill’s drama was designed to expressionistically unmask the psyche, only in his later realism, especially in Long Day’s Journey into Night , did O’Neill manage to reveal the psyche and rise to metaphoric heights. In the last phase of his career, his writing reflected the movements of the psyche, suggesting that beneath changes in appearance, there is an eternal, unchanging pattern contained in a universe beyond our comprehension. In mankind, too, there is a “basic sameness” that O’Neill constantly strives to reveal (Törnqvist 254).

Tony Kushner extols Long Day’s Journey into Night as the “definitive family drama” of the American theater (256). At the end of his career, trying to give rest to the inner demons that pursued him throughout his life, O’Neill penetrates the “truth” of the lives of the Tyrone family, based on a tortuous examination of his own family. Aided only by a dining-room table and natural symbols—fog, foghorn, and time’s passage in one twenty-four-hour period—O’Neill provides an unbreakable chain of events. He taps into an easily understandable basic conceptual metaphor lodged in a realistic experience: life as a journey to some destination and an experience of time as a continuous natural flow. A day in the life of the Tyrones is recreated, as day moves into night in a natural cycle. With careful picturization and staging of specific moments centered around the dining table, in relation to the source of light, O’Neill creates a visual rhythm and a source of emotional punctuation.

The Tyrones fail on their journeys to find home, a modicum of peace, understanding, and fulfillment. At play’s end, the dark night of the soul for all the Tyrones has taken hold, as the parlor becomes the confessional, the family marooned as though on an island. When Mary descends the stairs, trailing her wedding dress and confessing her lack of a spiritual core, her fear that “it” can’t be “altogether lost,” the theatrical statement is metaphorically clear: the Tyrones—and, by extension, all of us—are lost.

Subjective Realism: Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller

While O’Neill expanded realism’s boundaries through his early theatrical experiments and later poetic realism, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller mixed the techniques of realism and expressionism to create “subjective” or “poetic” realism. Both artists turned inward, crafting an intensely psychological drama, reflective of a threatened, socially problematic society in which alienated characters fight for survival within the confines of their troubled families. As Kenneth Tynan states, “What links them is their love for the bruised individual soul and its life of quiet desperation” (qtd. in Cohn, Dialogue 97).

Williams and Miller wrote in response to the 1930s, a decade filled with historical and social pressure: the 1929 stock-market crash, the onset of the Great Depression, the rise of Nazi Germany, the war in Spain. It was a time that prompted the founding of Harold Clurman’s Group Theatre (1931–1941), whose most prominent playwright was Clifford Odets, an icon to Miller. Odets’s Waiting for Lefty (1935) exemplifies “agitprop” theater, political and sociological documentary material in which the stage is used for political ends as a way to express the conflicting social and economic forces that threatened American well-being (Smith 126–130). The 1930s also witnessed an infusion of melodrama in the works of Lillian Hellman, who depicted reality as a battle between the forces of good and evil in The Children’s Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), and Watch on the Rhine (1941).

The decade also saw the political plays of Williams ( Candles to the Sun, The Fugitive Kind ) and Miller ( No Villain, They Too Arise ). Following these early works, the trajectory of both men’s careers took a different path, leading them to expressionistically reconstruct a belief in environmental conditioning that became Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944) and Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949). Cased within realistic frameworks, both plays subjectively explore the illusory American dream within the confines of troubled families, and they testify to Miller’s belief that all great themes are really only one: “How may a man make of the outside world a home” (qtd. in Martin and Centola 73). Against the backdrop of the Depression, Williams and Miller place their characters under stress in urban, soul-destroying settings and enacted battles between family members who love one another while fighting to retain their individuality and freedom.

The Glass Menagerie , a memory play, tells the story of Tom Wingfield, oppressed by the suffocating realities of his life, who breaks away from his mindless job and the tensions of his work and familial life, including his overbearing mother, Amanda, and his extremely introverted and fragile sister, Laura. Tom’s guilt at abandoning his sister is palpable as the play unfolds through his eyes. In this play and others, Williams was on a quest: to restore a sense of poetry to lives rendered void by the banality of the world. Christopher Bigsby points out that “Williams brought to the American theatre a striking blend of prosaic literalness and poetic yearning, half pathos and half genuine lyricism” ( A Critical Introduction 19). Williams pressed the boundaries between realism and expressionism, mirroring his belief that the theater was organic, capable of dissolving the literal in search of life’s animating principles.

In his famous production notes to the play, Williams called for a “new plastic theatre to take the place of the exhausted theatre of realistic conventions if the theatre is to resume vitality as part of our culture.” His intention was not to escape reality but to pursue “a more penetrating and vivid expression of things as they are” (Williams 7). Williams’s vision necessitated a more fluid, nonlinear method of storytelling, relying on flashbacks, which expressively dissolve the boundaries between the real and the imagined, and a rearranged theatrical space—both meant to penetrate subjective reality. He provided gauzy atmospheres, lyrical poetry, and naturalistic details in the manner of Chekhov.

The Glass Menagerie preceded Miller’s Death of a Salesman by five years and influenced Miller’s expressionism in that play. Miller’s realism emanates from his belief that dramatic form could result in moral action and that, reminiscent of Ibsen, drama is a social and temporal art relying on revelation to reach a conclusion, yet from his essays and plays, clearly, Miller was open to an exploration of more poetic and nonrepresentational forms. In Death of a Salesman , Miller was determined to be more radical. He took his audience on an internal journey through the mind, memories, fears, and anxieties of Willy Loman, locating these in the context of those he encounters in both fact and imagination.

Miller lays bare the reality of Willy Loman, the salesman, partly through his mind and memory. In the manner of Ibsen, Miller leaves one with questions: How can a romantic, such as Willy, possibly survive in an antiromantic, capitalist society? What is the meaning of the American dream? Salesman was not meant to be poetic drama; rather, “Willy’s prosaic life was to be contained within a dream of possibility” (Bigsby, Arthur Miller 319). And therein lies the poetry: Miller did not abandon the realistic form but rather opened his drama up to the poetic impulse he had detected in Williams’s The Glass Menagerie . The times of the play’s action fluctuate between 1942 and 1928, making a simple narration of plot impossible. The play’s style reflects Willy’s psychology—divided between past and present—a mind unrestrained, unable to function in society. Beyond experimenting with character, from Williams, Miller learned that a realistic framework could be used in an expressionistic manner by employing unconventional scene designs, and translucent and transparent walls.

A playwright writes about either family or society, according to Miller. He believed that while we feel our family relationships, all great plays extend themselves, in concentric circles, pushing out from the family into society, ultimately coming to rest in the fate of mankind. The greatness of The Glass Menagerie and Death of a Salesman lies in the poetry and metaphoric knowledge they provide about both family and society. Such knowledge is the reason for their considerable influence on the next generation of playwrights.

Realism’s Language: David Mamet, August Wilson, and Sam Shepard

Realistic rhetoric suggests objectivity, a detailed and truthful recording of experience, prompting agreement that “this is how life really is.” Beginning in the 1890s, such consensus meant turning away from the ornamental language of melodrama—the soliloquy and the aside—considered disruptive to the illusion of reality (Murphy 36). Rather than being passive receptors in the thrall of the celebrated actors of the time, such as James O’Neill or Edwin Booth, now audiences were invited to trespass, to overhear conversations between ordinary characters who, through dialogue, advance plot.

After Ibsen, as linguistic theory evolved, the recognition gradually grew that language could not be used as a kind of undistorting mirror or as a perfectly transparent window into reality. For drama, creating realistic dialogue meant going beyond a one-to-one relationship between signifier (the word tree , for example, and the thing it represents, the actual arboreal object typically found in forests). Further, language theory evolved to include speech-act theory, emphasizing that many utterances that seemed factual—that imparted straightforward information—were much more mysterious and open to manipulation (Austin 1–2).

Dramatic realism’s evolution can be traced through language, which continues to evolve, becoming ever more complex and inclusive. While all playwrights are, by necessity, “language playwrights,” some call special attention to language. One thinks of Glaspell’s inarticulate characters, O’Neill’s repetitions, and Williams’s poetry. Examples also include David Mamet’s “speech acts,” August Wilson’s metaphoric storytelling, and Sam Shepard’s visual postmodern language.

Mamet is a playwright to listen to. His “Mametspeak” is “word jazz,” a signature mix of jargon, American machismo, and broken emotion, picked up from real people, speech acts acquiring meaning within the context in which they are uttered, including the ideological, social, and cultural conventions that constitutes language. In Act I of American Buffalo (1976), Teach and Don plan a robbery:

Teach: Wake up, Don, let’s plan this out. The spirit of the thing? Pause . Let’s not be loose on this. People are loose, people pay the price … Don: You’re right. Teach: (And I like you like a brother, Don.) So let’s wake up on this. All right? Pause . A man, he walks in here, well-dressed … (With a briefcase?) Don: (No.) Teach: All right … comes into a junkshop looking for coins. Pause . He spots a valuable nickel hidden in a pile of shit. He farts around, he picks up this, he farts around, he picks up that. Don: (He wants the nickel.) Teach: No shit. He goes to check out, he goes ninety on the nick. Don: (He would of gone five times that.) Teach: (Look, don’t kick yourself.) All right, we got a guy knows coins. Where does he keep his coin collection? Don: Hidden. Teach: The man hides his coin collection, we’re probably looking the guy has a study … I mean, he’s not the kind of guy to keep it in the basement … (45–46)

Mamet writes in an American, specifically Chicagoan, male vernacular—rhythmic street language, jagged and percussive syntax that alternates between the elevated and the obscene, determining behavior. His dialogic structure is “repetitious [with] simultaneous delivery, overlappings, cut-ins, incomplete sentences, pronunciation oddities and the presence in the middle of sentences of non-verbal exclamatory sounds” (Carroll 127). Language, in a Mamet play, doesn’t refer to action but itself is the action.

Mamet’s characters speak in a “heightened naturalism,” closer to poetry than prose. Indeed, Mamet believes his speech acts provide not realism but poetry; they are his interpretation of how people talk and are based on the musical qualities of speech. Yet, as Bigsby points out, “the fact that [Mamet’s dialogue] … has a lot of four-letter words might make it difficult to see that it’s written in free verse ( Modern American Drama 212). And Ruby Cohn argues that the function of Mamet’s language is to convey the sense of energy that reflects both a literal reality and a metaphoric reality, embracing several meanings at once (“How Are Things” 117).

Glengarry Glen Ross (1982) details salesmen’s talk, showcasing their ability or inability to sell worthless property through guile and chicanery. In Act I, Scene 3, Roma, a salesman’s salesman, convinces the unsuspecting Lingk to seize the moment and buy:

the true reserve that I have is the strength that I have of acting each day without fear. ( Pause .) According to the dictates of my mind. ( Pause .) Stocks, bonds, objects of art, real estate. Now: what are they? ( Pause .) An opportunity. To what? To make money? Perhaps. To lose money? Perhaps. To “indulge” and to “learn” about ourselves. Perhaps. … What isn’t ? They’re an opportunity . That’s all. They’re an event . (49–50)

Language centers the play, central to the salesmen’s identities and their relationships with each other. The salesmen manipulate language within the ritual of selling; their discourse reveals the distance between how they define themselves and where they actually are within the business system. In its critique of the battle entered into by the salesmen of Glengarry within the world of ruthless, unfettered capitalism, the play rises above the particular and provides metaphoric insight into manhood, truth, the acquisition of money, and the meaning of success in capitalist America.

While Mamet’s jagged, percussive speech ultimately culminates in a collective appreciation for the hollow, antihuman money-making machine that may realistically capture American work life, Wilson’s storytelling beckons to another universal world beyond Pittsburgh, in which he locates his cycle of plays. His “Century Cycle” is composed of ten plays, nine of which are set in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, an African American neighborhood that takes on a mythic literary significance; the plays represent different decades in twentieth-century black America. Wilson’s objective in writing the Century Cycle was not as much to retrieve the past or to reaffirm black experience as it was to identify and constitute black history (Bigsby, The Cambridge Companion 4).

Wilson carries that black experience forward to create a human bridge, fulfilling the essential role of metaphor: to capture the essential nature of an experience. Following poet Robert Duncan’s dictum that form should equal content, Wilson uses metaphor and condensed speech. From the Greeks and Aristotle, metaphor means “to carry something across,” to “transfer,” giving one thing a name that belongs to something else. I. A. Richards stressed that metaphor was intrinsic to language itself. Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, George Lakoff, David Punter, and Zoltan Kovecses have expanded our understanding of metaphor beyond Aristotle and Richards. Metaphor, they argue, offers a bigger stage upon which to consider our thought processes.

For Wilson, that stage, that larger constellation, is built on the art of the story, an essential form for much of black drama, through which Wilson codified the experiences and cultural impulses of black Americans. Anne Bogart points out that the power of telling stories is lodged in their ability to create bridges; she calls storytelling an “act of heroism,” because when “you actually reach out and tell a story to someone, you’re creating an empathetic bridge,” which helps to “unstick” thoughts and beliefs (“Role of Storytelling”).

The stories Wilson tells are of those Americans who, while peripheral to society, are not peripheral to themselves. He listened to the music of each decade, heard the voices of those he had grown up with, recognized the value of those voices, and then transformed the vernacular rhythms and swaggering street talk into eloquence (Bigsby, The Cambridge Companion 5, 13). The blues lie at the center of his work, “what beat in his head”; they were “the flagbearer … of self-definition. They constitute what he called a ‘sacred book’ … offering an emotional correlative to the African-Americans’ response to experience. To Wilson, their significance lay in their power to transmute suffering into affirmation, seemingly random events into form. … Compacted within the blues was black history, a history of defeat and triumph” (Bigsby, The Cambridge Companion 11–12).

In Fences (1985), a play representing the 1950s, Wilson controls the drama through its prominent symbol—that of the fence—and builds toward a metaphorically rich, complex, and dark understanding of its implications. Though Robert Frost waxed poetically that “good fences make good neighbors,” fences also double as walls and borders protecting property, conveying a fear of the “other.” The characters’ lives change around the fence-building project, which serves as both a literal and a figurative device, representing the relationships that bond and break in the arena of the backyard. Rose, Troy’s wife, wants the fence built as a symbol to protect her family, whereas Troy’s lack of commitment to finishing the fence parallels his lack of commitment in his marriage.

In Fences , Troy Maxson is a garbage collector who has taken great pride in keeping his family together and providing for them. Troy’s rebellion and frustration emanate from his stymied baseball career and lack of prospects for advancement in segregated white America that will not allow a black man to drive a garbage truck. Yet Troy stands as a model of stability, representing the unnoticed and uncelebrated black working class and the stoicism of his generation—wounded, pushed onward, embittered, yet indomitable.

Wilson’s metaphoric storytelling is based on realism—linear and historical. William Demastes notes that Wilson used storytelling to work within the idiom of the American stage in order to successfully enter the American mainstream, and he embraced its expectations. In the process, he transformed “African American into something recognizably ‘American’ ” (qtd. in Menson-Furr 212).

In contradistinction to Wilson’s planned narrative cycle and Mamet’s taut, precise writing in which every scene is scrutinized to forward the play’s meaning, Shepard’s unfixed postmodern unpredictability does not follow a preconceived meaning or ruling idea. Words and terms used to describe his style include “open-ended,” a “theatre of fragments, a “verbal and visual glut,” “thematic fragments [that] relate to and are created by emotional conditions,” “collages,” “patchworks,” and “fractured poetry” (Bottoms 3).

In his plays of the 1960s and 1970s ( The Rock , 1964; Up to Thursday , 1964; The Holy Ghostly , 1970; Black Bag Beast , 1971), brief, nonrealistic pieces marked by a visual, stream-of-consciousness style, “filled with fantastic twists of narrative and lacking closure,” Shepard employs a free-form technique (Roudane 3). These early pieces are more like experiential theatrical events demanding active engagement than dramas to be read. Presenting more questions than answers, they eschewed storylines, since, for Shepard, the myths necessary to generate the stories, the metaphors, no longer existed As Shepard says, “storytelling with a beginning, middle and end—didn’t mean anything anymore … because everything’s so fragmented and broken” (qtd. in Bigsby, “Born Injured” 11).

The writing process, for Shepard, is mysterious and inspired, having the power to reveal the unknown. Yet “language is broken” and stripped of meaning, and “metaphors [have been] pulled apart” (Bigsby, “Born Injured” 9). Because language fails to reveal what it signifies, Shepard’s intention is to make language transparent to reveal fully what is signified, to make the signified present, not representational. Further, since language lags behind feeling, Shepard relies on musically inspired language rhythms to bombard audiences, as well as the power of the visual to convey a sense of seeing the action from the inside (Bottoms 2). He infuses his plays with jazz and rock to open viewers to another dimension of emotional experience.

Like O’Neill and Miller, whose careers are not easily categorized, Shepard’s playwriting avoids categorizing. To fulfill his desire for a more stable dramatic platform, Shepard adopted a modified realism in the mid-1970s. And by 1978, in a series of three domestic dramas ( Curse of the Starving Class, Buried Child , and culminating in True West ), Shepard established his own idiosyncratic form of stage realism reflecting shattered families experiencing absurdist moments, showcasing his flair for the irrational but writing within a recognizable universe. His form of realism was, as Shepard said, “not the kind of realism where husbands and wives squabble” (qtd. in Hart 65).

In his family plays, Shepard transitioned from “images of a theatrical reality to the metaphorical presentation of a world outside the stage”; he relinquished “the freedom of nonlinear progression”; he fixed time and space (Hart 67–68). The plays make use of narrative plots, though they are sketchy and peopled with erratic characters. Moreover, his dialogue reflects a closer correspondence between the spoken word and its intended meaning.

True West stands apart from Curse of the Starving Class and Buried Child , since it is principally realistic—both psychologically and scenographically. The setting is the house of brothers Austin and Lee’s mother in the early 1980s—crossroads between the new West and the old, or “true,” West, approximately thirty minutes outside of Hollywood with all its glitz and glamour, close to the foothills and the desert, complete with the musicality provided by yapping coyotes. Shepard insisted on a “rigorously detailed realism in the construction of True West ’s set,” which captures almost the feel and photographic insight into the postmodern suburban landscape (Bottoms 203). Shepard refers to houseplants, wall telephones, a kitchen table, a typewriter; he reaches for images to describe the relationship between things and ideas.

In their search for the true West, brothers Austin and Lee dramatize the conflict between the chains of the past and the realities of the present; they explore the boundaries of love, resentment, and civilization. Shepard relies on psychological realism—two halves of one self—to convey a natural opposition within the self, encapsulated in the figures of two brothers in conflict, with disparate attitudes toward life, art, and the myth of the West as a place of authenticity and as the seat of true national identity. As Shepard “rides these characters out” to the end of their conflict, reality becomes unfixed.

True West and Shepard’s entire output present a kind of Whitmanesque “Song of Myself,” exploring the territories within his own psyche (Bottoms 13). His drama probes the collective unconscious and represents a postmodern perspective on the search for coherence not only in the self but in capitalist culture, as well as in the creative process. As Shepard turns away from linear causality and wades “into the river of circumstances,” his plays represent the dynamic, nonlinear, and evolving chaos of the “powerful sweeps of pattern and energy that is our lives” (Demastes and Vanden Huevel 273). John Lion points out that Shepard’s work also underscores realism’s objective: to confront “the ‘reality’ of a world that doesn’t make sense, can never make sense, will never make sense” (qtd. in Bottoms 11).

In his theatrical reflections, Miller suggests that the meaning of a dramatic work is intimately connected to its form. Realism’s form is broad and flexible, founded on verisimilitude and a theatricality that serves—not overwhelms—plot and characters. In its earliest iteration, realism cast a narrow silhouette, adhering to a linear causality, eschewing theatricality, its characters reflecting ordinary life, speaking in plain language. Early practitioners of the form, never meant to be purely a mimetic art form, strove to pierce the surface of reality and welcomed expressionistic experimentation. Today’s realism is not limited to linear storytelling, admitting a greater infusion of theatricality and experimentation with language. What remains true about today’s realistic theater is that it responds to its historical moment, continues to embrace the domestic, and reaches for metaphoric truth.

American dramatic realism continues to follow certain lines of development. Ibsen’s moral directive, Chekhov’s psychological nuance, and Strindberg’s rebelliousness have left indelible imprints on the American theater, influencing the plays of O’Neill, Williams, and Miller. In turn, their experiments affected those who followed in their wake: Albee, Guare, Lanford Wilson, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, Wasserstein, Kushner, Mamet, August Wilson, Shepard.

In a postmodern world, cause and effect may not be apparent, and theatricality is omnipresent; still, an intricate web of connectivity exists between those writing within the confines of realism today and past masters of the form. The focus remains on the playwrights and their plays: on those of Lynn Nottage, whose lineage can be traced to Ibsen and Miller; on Paul Vogel, Tracy Letts, David-Lindsay Abaire, and Stephen Karma, whose works are focused on the domestic and are, to some degree, reminiscent of O’Neill; on Neil LaBute’s language, which mimics that of Mamet; on the ways in which one can hear the voice of August Wilson in the work of Suzi-Lori Parks and in the historical stories of Lauren Gunderson; and on Octavio Solis’s unpredictable style, which is reminiscent of Shepard. Realism continues in the American theater and fulfills its function: to reflect actual life.

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• Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition

In this Book

• William W. Demastes
• Published by: The University of Alabama Press

Any review of 20th-century American theatre invariably leads to the term realism. Yet despite the strong tradition of theatrical realism on the American stage, the term is frequently misidentified, and the practices to which it refers are often attacked as monolithically tyrannical, restricting the potential of the American national theatre. This book reconsiders realism on the American stage by addressing the great variety and richness of the plays that form the American theatre canon. By reconsidering the form and revisiting many of the plays that contributed to the realist tradition, the authors provide the opportunity to apprise strengths often overlooked by previous critics. The volume traces the development of American dramatic realism from James A. Herne, the "American Ibsen," to currently active contemporaries such as Sam Shepard, David Mamet, and Marsha Norman. This frank assessment, in sixteen original essays, reopens a critical dialog too long closed.

Essays include:

• American Dramatic Realisms, Viable Frames of Thought
• The Struggle for the Real--Interpretive Con§ict, Dramatic Method, and the Paradox of Realism
• The Legacy of James A. Herne: American Realities and Realisms
• Whose Realism? Rachel Crothers's Power Struggle in the American Theatre
• The Provincetown Players' Experiments with Realism
• Servant of Three Masters: Realism, Idealism, and "Hokum" in American High Comedy

Table of Contents

• Title Page, Copyright, Dedication
• Preface: American Dramatic Realisms, Viable Frames of Thought
• pp. ix-xvii
• 1. Introduction: The Struggle for the Real—Interpretive Conflict, Dramatic Method, and the Paradox of Realism
• Brian Richardson
• 2. The Legacy of James A. Herne: American Realities and Realisms
• Patricia D. Denison
• 3. Whose Realism? Rachel Crothers’s Power "Struggle in the American Theatre
• Yvonne Shafer
• 4. The Provincetown Players’ Experiments with Realism
• J. Ellen Gainor
• 5. Servant of Three Masters: Realism, Idealism, and “Hokum” in American High Comedy
• Robert F. Gross
• 6. Remembering the Disremembered: Feminist Realists of the Harlem Renaissance
• Patricia R. Schroeder
• 7. Eugene O’Neill and Reality in America
• Frank R. Cunningham
• pp. 107-122
• 8. “Odets, Where Is Thy Sting?” Reassessing the “Playwright of the Proletariat”
• John W. Frick
• pp. 123-138
• 9. Thornton Wilder, the Real, and Theatrical Realism
• Christopher J. Wheatley
• pp. 139-155
• 10. Into the Foxhole: Feminism, Realism, and Lillian Hellman
• Judith E. Barlow
• pp. 156-171
• 11. Tennessee Williams’s “Personal Lyricism”: Toward an Androgynous Form
• Thomas P. Adler
• pp. 172-188
• 12. Arthur Miller: Revisioning Realism
• Brenda Murphy
• pp. 189-202
• 13. Margins in the Mainstream: Contemporary Women Playwrights
• Janet V. Haedicke
• pp. 203-217
• 14. The Limits of African-American Political Realism: Baraka’s Dutchman and Wilson‘s Ma Rainey‘s Black Bottom
• Eric Bergesen and William W. Demastes
• pp. 218-234
• 15. Anti-Theatricality and American Ideology: Mamet’s Performative Realism
• Michael L. Quinn
• pp. 235-254
• 16. The Hurlyburly Lies of the Causalist Mind: Chaos and the Realism of Rabe and Shepard
• William W. Demastes and Michael Vanden Heuvel
• pp. 255-274
• Selected Bibliography
• pp. 275-278
• Contributors
• pp. 279-282
• pp. 283-290

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Nineteenth-century french realism.

Young Communards in Prison (Les Fédérés à la Conciergerie)

Gustave Courbet

The Past, the Present, and the Future (Le passé – Le présent – L'Avenir), published in La Caricature, no. 166, Jan. 9, 1834

Honoré Daumier

Le ventre législatif: Aspect des bancs ministériels de la chambre improstituée de 1834

Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril, 1834, Plate 24 of l'Association mensuelle

Retreat from the Storm

Jean-François Millet

The Horse Fair

Rosa Bonheur

Young Ladies of the Village

Sheepshearing Beneath a Tree

Woman with a Rake

The Third-Class Carriage

The Witnesses - The War Council

First Steps, after Millet

Vincent van Gogh

Ross Finocchio Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

The Realist movement in French art flourished from about 1840 until the late nineteenth century, and sought to convey a truthful and objective vision of contemporary life. Realism emerged in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1848 that overturned the monarchy of Louis-Philippe and developed during the period of the Second Empire under Napoleon III. As French society fought for democratic reform, the Realists democratized art by depicting modern subjects drawn from the everyday lives of the working class. Rejecting the idealized classicism of academic art and the exotic themes of Romanticism , Realism was based on direct observation of the modern world. In keeping with Gustave Courbet’s  statement in 1861 that “painting is an essentially concrete art and can only consist in the representation of real and existing things,” Realists recorded in often gritty detail the present-day existence of humble people, paralleling related trends in the naturalist literature of Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert. The elevation of the working class into the realms of high art and literature coincided with Pierre Proudhon’s socialist philosophies and Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto , published in 1848, which urged a proletarian uprising.

Courbet (1819–1877) established himself as the leading proponent of Realism by challenging the primacy of history painting, long favored at the official Salons and the École des Beaux-Arts, the state-sponsored art academy. The groundbreaking works that Courbet exhibited at the Paris Salons of 1849 and 1850–51—notably A Burial at Ornans (Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and The Stonebreakers (destroyed)—portrayed ordinary people from the artist’s native region on the monumental scale formerly reserved for the elevating themes of history painting. At the time, Courbet’s choice of contemporary subject matter and his flouting of artistic convention was interpreted by some as an anti-authoritarian political threat. Proudhon, in fact, read The Stonebreakers as an “irony directed against our industrialized civilization … which is incapable of freeing man from the heaviest, most difficult, most unpleasant tasks, the eternal lot of the poor.” To achieve an honest and straightforward depiction of rural life, Courbet eschewed the idealized academic technique and employed a deliberately simple style, rooted in popular imagery, which seemed crude to many critics of the day. His Young Ladies of the Village ( 40.175 ), exhibited at the Salon of 1852, violates conventional rules of scale and perspective and challenges traditional class distinctions by underlining the close connections between the young women (the artist’s sisters), who represent the emerging rural middle class, and the poor cowherd who accepts their charity.

When two of Courbet’s major works ( A Burial at Ornans and The Painter’s Studio ) were rejected by the jury of the 1855 Exposition Universelle in Paris, he withdrew his eleven accepted submissions and displayed his paintings privately in his Pavillon du Réalisme, not far from the official international exhibition. For the introduction to the catalogue of this independent, one-man show, Courbet wrote a Realist manifesto, echoing the tone of the period’s political manifestos, in which he asserts his goal as an artist “to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch according to my own estimation.” In his autobiographical Painter’s Studio (Musée d’Orsay), Courbet is surrounded by groups of his friends, patrons, and even his models, documenting his artistic and political experiences since the Revolution of 1848.

During the same period, Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) executed scenes of rural life that monumentalize peasants at work, such as Sheep Shearing Beneath a Tree ( 40.12.3 ). While a large portion of the French population was migrating from rural areas to the industrialized cities, Millet left Paris in 1849 and settled in Barbizon , where he lived the rest of his life, close to the rustic subjects he painted throughout his career. The Gleaners (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), exhibited at the Salon of 1857, created a scandal because of its honest depiction of rural poverty. The bent postures of Millet’s gleaners, as well as his heavy application of paint, emphasize the physical hardship of their task. Like Courbet’s portrayal of stonebreakers, Millet’s choice of subject was considered politically subversive, even though his style was more conservative than that of Courbet, reflecting his academic training. Millet endows his subjects with a sculptural presence that recalls the art of Michelangelo and Nicolas Poussin , as seen in his Woman with a Rake ( 38.75 ). His tendency to generalize his figures gives many of his works a sentimental quality that distinguishes them from Courbet’s unidealized paintings. Vincent van Gogh greatly admired Millet and made copies of his compositions, including First Steps, after Millet ( 64.165.2 ).

The socially conscious art of Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) offers an urban counterpart to that of Millet. Daumier highlighted socioeconomic distinctions in the newly modernized urban environment in a group of paintings executed around 1864 that illustrate the experience of modern rail travel in first-, second-, and third-class train compartments. In The First-Class Carriage (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore), there is almost no physical or psychological contact among the four well-dressed figures, whereas The Third-Class Carriage ( 29.100.129 ) is tightly packed with an anonymous crowd of working-class men and women. In the foreground, Daumier isolates three generations of an apparently fatherless family, conveying the hardship of their daily existence through the weary poses of the young mother and sleeping boy. Though clearly of humble means, their postures, clothing, and facial features are rendered in as much detail as those of the first-class travelers.

Best known as a lithographer , Daumier produced thousands of graphic works for journals such as La Caricature and Le Charivari , satirizing government officials and the manners of the bourgeoisie. As early as 1832, Daumier was imprisoned for an image of Louis-Philippe as Rabelais’ Gargantua, seated on a commode and expelling public honors to his supporters. Daumier parodied the king again in 1834 with his caricature The Past, the Present, and the Future ( 41.16.1 ), in which the increasingly sour expressions on the three faces of Louis-Philippe suggest the failures of his regime. In the same year, Daumier published Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834 , in the journal Association Mensuelle ( 20.23 ). Though Daumier did not witness the event portrayed—the violent suppression of a workers’ demonstration—the work is unsparing in its grim depiction of death and government brutality; Louis-Philippe ordered the destruction of all circulating prints immediately after its publication.

As a result of Courbet’s political activism during the Paris Commune of 1871, he too was jailed. Incarcerated at Versailles before serving a six-month prison sentence for participation in the destruction of the Vendôme Column, Courbet documented his observations of the conditions under which children were held in his drawing Young Communards in Prison ( 1999.251 ), published in the magazine L’Autograph , one of a small number of works inspired by his experiences following the fall of the Commune.

Like Millet, Rosa Bonheur (1822–1899) favored rural imagery and developed an idealizing style derived from the art of the past. Similar in scale to Courbet’s works of the same period, Bonheur’s imposing Horse Fair ( 87.25 ), shown at the Salon of 1853, is the product of extensive preparatory drawings and the artist’s scientific study of animal anatomy; her style also reflects the influence of such Romantic painters as Delacroix and Gericault and the classical equine sculpture from the Parthenon. Édouard Manet and the Impressionists were the immediate heirs to the Realist legacy, as they too embraced the imagery of modern life. By the 1870s and 1880s, however, their art no longer carried the political charge of Realism.

Finocchio, Ross. “Nineteenth-Century French Realism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rlsm/hd_rlsm.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Nochlin, Linda. Realism . Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971.

Nochlin, Linda. Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900: Sources and Documents . Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966.

Tinterow, Gary. Introduction to Modern Europe / The Metropolitan Museum of Art . New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987. See on MetPublications

Additional Essays by Ross Finocchio

• Finocchio, Ross. “ Fra Angelico (ca. 1395–1455) .” (October 2006)
• Finocchio, Ross. “ Mannerism: Bronzino (1503–1572) and his Contemporaries .” (October 2003)

Related Essays

• The Barbizon School: French Painters of Nature
• Claude Monet (1840–1926)
• Édouard Manet (1832–1883)
• Gustave Courbet (1819–1877)
• Impressionism: Art and Modernity
• The Ashcan School
• Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)
• Edgar Degas (1834–1917): Painting and Drawing
• Édouard Baldus (1813–1889)
• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)
• Henri Matisse (1869–1954)
• James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903)
• Jean Antoine Houdon (1741–1828)
• Lithography in the Nineteenth Century
• Louis-Rémy Robert (1810–1882)
• Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844–1926)
• Nadar (1820–1910)
• Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665)
• The Pre-Raphaelites
• Romanticism
• The Salon and the Royal Academy in the Nineteenth Century
• Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890)
• Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France
• France, 1800–1900 A.D.
• 19th Century A.D.
• Barbizon School
• French Literature / Poetry
• Genre Scene
• History Painting
• Impressionism
• Literature / Poetry
• Oil on Canvas
• Pastoral Scene
• Printmaking

Artist or Maker

• Bonheur, Rosa
• Courbet, Gustave
• Daumier, Honoré
• Manet, Édouard
• Millet, Jean-François
• Poussin, Nicolas
• Van Gogh, Vincent

Online Features

• The Artist Project: “Swoon on Honoré Daumier’s The Third-Class Carriage “
• The Artist Project: “Wayne Thiebaud on Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair “
• The Artist Project: “Xu Bing on Jean-François Millet’s Haystacks: Autumn “

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Dramatic Arts. Gr. 11. Topic 1. Realism in the Theatre and Konstantin Stanislavski. T1. W2

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Engaging Global Cinema Cultures: Discourses and Disruptions

Global Cinema Symposium

Organized by the Harry W. Bass Jr. School of Arts, Humanities, and Technology

  Nov. 1-2, 2024

In-person at the University of Texas at Dallas

Keynote Speakers:

Dr. Lúcia Nagib ( University of Reading)

Dr. Lalitha Gopalan (University of Texas at Austin)

Special guests include Dr. Iggy Cortez (University of California, Berkeley), Dr. Shekhar Deshpande (Arcadia University), and Dr. Meta Mazaj (University of Pennsylvania).

The global nature of cinema has preoccupied scholars at least since André Bazin’s 1940s classification of film history into “classical” (Hollywood films) and “modern” (cinema produced in opposition to Hollywood) periods. With renewed urgency and in the midst of a rise in attention to “multiculturalism” in the 1990s, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam disrupted Eurocentric discourses on cinema, offering instead a polycentric approach to understanding the development of cinema around the globe. More recently, film scholars such as Lúcia Nagib, Stephanie Dennison, Song Hwee Lim, and Dudley Andrew have questioned the negative connotation of world or global cinema in anglophone film scholarship as well as film festival circuits, where the term is used as a replacement for non-Hollywood cinema or foreign art cinema. Twenty-first century approaches to global cinema include Nagib’s understanding of world cinema as a project centered on realism, Patricia White’s proposal to study women’s cinema as world cinema, Hamid Naficy’s study of films made by deterritorialized and displaced postcolonial filmmakers as accented cinema, and Deborah Shaw’s conceptualization of transnational cinema and its various registers.

With these disruptive discourses in mind, we are excited to invite papers for the inaugural biannual international symposium on Global Cinema, titled Engaging Global Cinema Cultures: Discourses and Disruptions . The driving questions of the symposium are: How can we explore the possibilities of studying alternative cartographies and epistemologies in global cinema? How do we understand contemporary spectatorship as interconnected global film cultures? Acknowledging the blurred geopolitical and economical boundaries in global cinema, where do we place the study of national cinemas? How do we reframe film studies curricula to reflect the innumerable possibilities of production, distribution, and exhibition of global cinemas offered by global cinema? What are the harmonies and chasms in transnational filmmaking practices in a glocalized world?

Conference Format : The symposium will be held in-person at the University of Texas at Dallas. We aim to create a network of scholars from around the world to develop theories, conceptual frameworks, and methodologies to reshape the field of global cinema. The symposium is envisioned as a two-day event that includes two keynote addresses by prominent scholars in the field, a featured panel of invited scholars to reflect on the state of the field, a workshop on syllabus development, and four traditional panels comprised of speakers selected from the open call for papers. The symposium also imagines more informal gatherings to promote collaboration and networking during meals and a reception on the first evening.

We welcome submissions that broadly engage with questions raised by the symposium theme, including but not limited to:

• Global sites of film production, reception, and exhibition: early cinema-present
• Theorizing World Cinema
• Decolonizing Film Studies
• Complicating identity, authenticity, and belonging in global filmmaking practices
• Conceptual intersections: national, transnational, world, and global cinemas
• Methods and methodologies in studying and teaching global cinema
• Interconnected cinema cultures: OTT platforms, film festivals, and classrooms
• Global cinema in the archives
• Global movements and interstices, and global cinema
• Filmmaking practices of diasporic, exilic, and immigrant communities
• Nationless cinemas, transnational activism, and transregional audiences
• Alternative production and reception practices in global cinema
• Politics of global cinema
• Avant-garde and experimental filmmaking in the global cinema ecosystem
• Paradigm shifts in global cinema pedagogy

Keynote Speakers

Dr. Lúcia Nagib , Professor of Film at the University of Reading. Nagib is an internationally recognised specialist in world cinema, cinematic realism, and cinematic intermediality, which she has explored through a novel approach in many publications, including her single-authored books Realist Cinema as World Cinema: Non-cinema, Intermedial Passages , Total Cinema (Amsterdam University Press, 2020) and World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism (Bloomsbury, 2011). She is an expert in a number of national cinemas, such as Brazilian, Japanese, and German cinemas.

Dr. Lalitha Gopalan , Associate professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and affiliate faculty in the Department of Asian Studies and South Asia Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Gopalan’s research and teaching interests are in the areas of Film Theory, Feminist Film Theory, Contemporary World Cinemas, Indian Cinemas, Genre Films, and Experimental Film and Video. Her essays and books include Cinemas Dark and Slow in Digital India (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; Orient Blackswan 2021), Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI Publishing, 2002), and Bombay (BFI Modern Classics, 2005), as well as the edited volume The Cinema of India (Wallflower Press, 2010). Her current book project explores various experimental film and video practices in India.

Submission Guidelines

• We invite individual papers from faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars. 
• Please use this link to make your submissions.
• The submission form requires abstracts of 300-350 words, a bibliography, and a short bio of approximately 100 words.

Timelines :

• Submission Deadline: June 15, 2024
• Notification of Acceptance: July 31, 2024

Contact email: [email protected]

Symposium Organizers, University of Texas at Dallas:

Shilyh Warren, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Film Studies

Mazyar Mahan, Ph.D. Student, Film Studies

Arya Rani, Ph.D. Candidate, Film Studies

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A Novelist Comes Home to Bury Her Words, and Brings Them Back to Life

In Julia Alvarez’s “The Cemetery of Untold Stories,” a boneyard in the Dominican Republic becomes a rich wellspring for discarded narratives.

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THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES , by Julia Alvarez

The best stories live within us long after the final word; characters and places continue beyond the lines on a page. Yet the image of all the unfinished, unsatisfying, impossible stories we leave in our wakes haunts the writer as well as the reader. And with more than 20 books published across a three-decade career, no one may be haunted more than Julia Alvarez.

The hero of Alvarez’s seventh novel, Alma Cruz, is a writer from the Dominican Republic who has come to the United States and created a literary life, beginning with critically acclaimed books about the motherland and evolving into a chronicler of life in the U.S.A. (Longtime readers of Alvarez’s work will recognize her own trajectory, from her early classics like “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents” and “In the Time of the Butterflies” through poetry, memoir, children’s books and more.)

The famous author has always wrestled shadow and sunlight, laughter and agony, into tales that sometimes felt like ghost stories. Readers knew to seek the truths behind the narrative — to find sorrow in the funniest scenes, or the unexpected outburst of joy in a somber one. Of course, I am speaking about Alma Cruz. (But also, Julia Alvarez.)

One day, Alma decides she has had enough with the fame game, the big career and its ups and downs. She comes to a lovely conclusion: It is time to return to the homeland she fled, and she will take all the drafts of her unfinished or unpublished books and lay them to rest there, giving each a proper burial. She buys a plot of land and begins to build a graveyard.

The locals become a fantastic choir of curious, suspicious, baffled neighbors: One rumor has it that “the place will be a resort, which would provide employment for maids, gardeners, waiters, cooks, watchmen”; another imagines “a grand house, complete with a swimming pool, a tennis court, a mini putting green.” Still another posits, “A baseball academy would be a dream come true for the tigueritos roaming the streets. Keep them out of trouble.” But when they realize Alma is building a graveyard, the outburst is comedic: a cemetery! Fear of zombies immediately clashes with the fear of homeless people defecating in mausoleums — and what kinds of jobs, by the way, are there in a boneyard? They have more reckoning to do when they realize Alma intends to put her stories in the ground, literally.

Word goes out that the great author has returned, and the locals flock to her like butterflies, everyone eager to share. A festival of storytelling breaks out in the tropics. Are the neighbors hoping to bury their own or are they giving life to tales untold? No matter. Rumors and gossip, histories and familial dramas swirl around Alma. “A little bird told me. Había una vez. Cuentan los viejos. Some scandal on the news, who is sleeping with whom, what fulano has done or said to fulana, a juicy chisme, a hot rumor. …” Amid the chatter, Alma’s own stories, the ones she has come home to bury, somehow find their place.

Soon Alma is meeting with architects, and more characters join in the cumbia of story — the dueling Perla and Filomena, who have not spoken for 30 years but keep each other’s phone numbers just in case. It is a shadowy feud, of course: “Way back, Filomena destroyed Perla’s peace of mind. The story has been buried so deep, it should have rotted into oblivion. But like Lazarus in la Biblia, it keeps coming back to life.”

Indeed. Here comes the fabulous Bienvenida (it means “Welcome”), with her tragic history that Alma cannot resist. She was once, you see, the wife of the dictator, Trujillo, a loyal and devoted first lady who is cast aside when she is unable to produce an heir. Eventually, El Jefe falls for the charms of another woman — “jealous and possessive, with a will equal to his own” — and Bienvenida’s “death knell comes when this mistress gives birth to a son.”

Men and boys, too, join in with their dramas and secrets, pride and regrets. As voices and stories are set free, it feels like a carnival, a festival. Alma’s first-person voice is jostled. We do not care; we are already in the warm sun and the sea wind and the cooking smells and the music of the dance.

As the book accelerates, the characters seem to become their own novelists. They rewrite their lives, they revise their histories, they reinvent their ongoing myths even as Alma is planning to bury her own stories in their troubled, sacred earth. Only an alchemist as wise and sure as Alvarez could swirl the elements of folklore and the flavor of magical realism around her modern prose and make it all sing.

The camino that “The Cemetery of Untold Stories” travels — from Vermont to the Dominican Republic, from literary fame to chosen retreat, from modern American writing to a profoundly Latin American tone — is lively, joyous, full of modern details and old tall tales. Any reader with roots and ancestors in other lands lives in a multiple-narrative story, one that we try to share with everyone, though we have to translate it. Yet we also go back to the ancestral home, and find ourselves translating our Yanqui life as well. Which story is the truest?

This often witty, occasionally somber and elegiac novel begins with a simple exhortation, in English: “Tell me a story.” It ends on a melancholy and evocative note. Spoiler alert: Another single line, this time in Spanish after the last page concludes, announces, “Este cuento se ha acabado.” (This story has ended.) A definitive slam of the door.

THE CEMETERY OF UNTOLD STORIES | By Julia Alvarez | Algonquin | 256 pp. | $28

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Got weekend plans? Here are 10 things happening in Columbus

Theater is in the spotlight this weekend, with three plays taking the stage. "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and "9 to 5: The Musical" are sure to evoke laughter, while "The Diary of Anne Frank" will move you to tears.

Also on stage are Deeply Rooted Dance Theater combining storytelling, ballet, modern and African dance, and comedians Bert Kreischer and Brian Regan, both of whom you can sneak preview by watching their Netflix specials.

There's also art, poetry, jazz and a book signing by comedian and "Daily Show" correspondent Dulce Sloan, so you have your pick of great events to choose from. Read more about them below. To receive these ideas in your inbox each week, sign up for the  Life in the 614 newsletter .

OSU Theatre to stage 'Putnam County Spelling Bee'

Winner of the Tony and the Drama Desk awards for Best Book, "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” takes a humorous, touching look at six awkward adolescents as they vie to become the spelling champ. Complete with audience participation, the charming musical will be presented by the Ohio State University Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and April 9-12 in OSU's Proscenium Theatre in the Theatre, Film, and Media Arts building, 1932 College Road. Ticket prices are $25, or $23 for senior citizens and Ohio State faculty, staff and Alumni Association members; $15 for OSU students and children in grades K-12. Tickets can be purchased at the OSU Theatre ticket office, by phone at 614-292-2295 or online via Ticketmaster . ( theatreandfilm.osu.edu )

Beeler Gallery art exhibit to examine realism

"What is Real?," the inaugural exhibition of work by 12 members of the Ohio Representational Art Collective, will open with a reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday in the Beeler Gallery at Columbus College of Art & Design, 60 Cleveland Ave. (The entrance is on Gay Street.) The free exhibition, which runs through April 27, focuses on human figures and portraits, showcasing a variety of mediums and approaches and was co-curated by artists Hiroshi Hayakawa, a CCAD photography professor, and Miriam Baranov. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. ( beelergallery.org )

Women to plot revenge in Otterbein's '9 to 5: The Musical'

Set in the late '70s to the music and lyrics of Dolly Parton, "9 to 5: The Musical" follows the hilarious happenings when three female co-workers scheme to get even with their sexist, egotistical, lying, hypocritical bigoted boss. Performed by the Otterbein University departments of Theatre & Dance and Music, the play based on the 1980 hit movie will come to the stage at 7:30 p.m. Thursday; 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday; and 8 p.m. April 11-13 in the Fritsche Theatre at Cowan Hall, 30 S. Grove St., Westerville. Tickets cost $30. The box office is open from noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and one hour before performances. (614-823-1109, otterbein.edu/drama )

Deeply Rooted to dance into Lincoln Theatre

As their name suggests, Deeply Rooted Dance Theater is deeply rooted in traditions of American and African American dance and storytelling, uniting ballet, modern and African dance. The Lincoln Theatre Association will host the Chicago-based company at 8 p.m. Thursday at the Lincoln Theatre, 769 E. Long St. Ticket prices start at $67, available in person at the CBUSArts Ticket Center, 39 E. State St., by phone at 614-469-0939 or online at lincolntheatrecolumbus.com . The association also is holding its annual Lights of the Lincoln Celebration, which will begin at 6 p.m. Thursday and includes an hors d’oeuvres buffet, wine, beer, cocktails and seating in the Lincoln Loge for Deeply Rooted Dance Theater. Ticket prices start at $175, available by contacting Emily Kilroy at [email protected] or 614-719-6610. ( lincolntheatrecolumbus.com )

Comic Bert Kreischer to give fans the old ‘razzle dazzle’

Dubbed “Number One Partier in the Nation” by Rolling Stone in 1997, Bert Kreischer has evolved into one of the top-grossing stand-up comics in the business, as well as a podcast host, actor and author. The 51-year-old funnyman will bring his “Tops Off World Tour” to Nationwide Arena, 200 W. Nationwide Blvd., at 7 p.m. Friday. Kreischer has several specials currently on Netflix, including his most recent — “Razzle Dazzle” — and is a renowned podcaster who has hosted 500-plus episodes of “Bertcast” as well as “2 Bears 1 Cave” with fellow comic Tom Segura. He also created, hosts and produces the YouTube cooking show, “Something’s Burning,” which has amassed more than 18.2 million views. Ticket prices start at $34.25 plus fees. ( ticketmaster.com )

Renowned British poet to headline poetry night

Portable Paradise: An International/Intercultural/Intergenerational Poetry Celebration, taking place from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday at Urban Arts Space, 50 W. Town St., will feature readings by high school and college students from Bexley High School, Columbus Academy, Otterbein University, Denison University and the Ohio State University. All are participants in writing workshops with Columbus poet-educator Peter Kahn and British poet Roger Robinson, winner of the prestigious T.S. Eliot Prize in 2019. Select students will share the stage with local poets Cynthia Amoah and Ajanae Dawkins, with Robinson as the headliner. If time permits, a Q&A will follow. This event is free but with limited seating, so RSVP at the link. ( bit.ly/4aQGbTR )

Gramercy Books to host Dulce Sloan book signing

Considered one of the sharpest voices in comedy, Dulce Sloan will be at Gramercy Books of Bexley, 2424 E. Main St. from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday for a signing of her first memoir, “Hello Friends!: Stories of Dating, Destiny, and Day Jobs,” a hilarious roller coaster ride through Sloan’s journey from a childhood moving between cities, being a Black kid in a predominately white school, starting her own business selling toys at a Miami flea market to finding her purpose while navigating comedy clubs, and the set of “The Daily Show” as a senior correspondent. This is a first-come, first-served free event with capacity limited to 70 people in the store at a time. ( gramercybooksbexley.com )

Saxophonist Jon Irbagon to kick off jazz series

Columbus nonprofit A Tribe for Jazz is celebrating Jazz Appreciation Month by launching its 2024 International Jazz Series on Saturday with saxophonist Jon Irabagon performing with the Zakk Jones Trio at 7:15 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. at Ginger Rabbit Jazz, 17 Buttles Ave. Doors open 30 minutes before showtime. Tickets cost $25. Other performers in the series are being featured for free this month including Spanish pianist-composer Marta Sanchez, April 13; George DeLancey’s sextet, April 18; Israeli harmonica virtuoso Roni Eytan, April 27; and International Jazz Day with British trumpeter Alexandra Ridout, April 30. See website for locations. The International Jazz Series runs through Sept. 14. ( gingerrabbitjazz.com )

Gallery Players to present 'The Diary of Anne Frank'

"The Diary of Anne Frank," Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett's passionate stage adaption of the posthumously published 1947 "The Diary of a Young Girl," will open at 2 p.m. Sunday in the Jewish Community Center of Greater Columbus' Roth/Resler Theater, 1125 College Ave. Presented by the Gallery Players, the stirring drama captures the fear, hope, laughter and grief of eight people hiding under Nazi persecution during the German occupation of the Netherlands. More performances will be at 7 p.m. April 11 and April 18; 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. April 14; and 2 p.m. April 21. Tickets cost $25. ( columbusjcc.org/annefrank )

Comedian Brian Regan to humor audience at McCoy Center

Brian Regan, who can be seen in the Netflix specials "On The Rocks" and "Nunchucks and Flamethrowers" as well as his own Netflix series "Stand Up And Away! With Brian Regan," will bring his observational brand of humor at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday to the McCoy Center for the Arts, 100 E. Dublin-Granville Road, New Albany. Regan also has earned praise for his portrayal of Mugsy, a recovering addict, on the TV series "Loudermilk," now streaming on Amazon Prime. Ticket prices start at $57, available at the CBUSArts Ticket Center, 39 E. State St., by phone at 614-469-0939 and online. ( capa.com , cbusarts.com )

[email protected]