Egyptian Roots

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Egyptian Roots

• c.2500 bce
• Ritual Enactment
• Abydos Passion Play re-enacted the story of the
  death and resurrection of Osiris

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Greek Festivals

• Festivals honored Olympian gods
• Ritual Competitions
• Olympics Apollo
• Athletics
• Lyric Poetry
• Drama Dionysos
• Dithyrambic Choruses
• Tragedy
• Comedy

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Greek Theatre

• 6th - 4th century bce
• Originated in festivals honoring Dionysos
• Thespis (6th c. bce)
• Tragedy
• Aeschylus (524-456 bce)
• Sophocles (496-406 bce)
• Euripides (480-406 bce)
• Comedy
• Aristophanes (c. 485- c.385 bce)
• Old Comedy bawdy and satiric
• New Comedy social situations

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Roman Theatre

• 2nd c. bce - 4th c. ce
• Origins in Greek drama and Roman festivals
• Tragedy Seneca
• 5 act structure
• Revenge motif -- sensationalistic
• Ghosts and supernatural
• ComedyTerence and Plautus
• Boy meets girl, complications, boy gets girl
  marriage
• Bawdy
• Stock characters

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Roman Spectacle

• Gladiatorial combats
• Naval battles in a flooded Coliseum
• Real-life theatricals
• Decadent, violent and immoral
• All theatrical events banned by Church when Rome
  became Christianized

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Medieval Drama 13th-15th C.

• Arose from need to educate converted, illiterate
  Christians about Christianity
• Hrotsvita (10th c.), German nun, wrote plays
  about Christian matyrs using structure based on
  Terences Roman comedies
• Liturgical drama
• Mystery plays Biblical tales
• Miracle plays Saints lives
• Morality plays Allegories

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Italian Commedia dell Arte

• La Commedia dell'Arte, "Artistic Comedy, began
  in the second half of the 16th century
• Based on set pieces, lazzi, that are improvised
  with stock characters
• A distinct group of actors gave birth to the
  first nucleus of companies, and started doing
  their acts on simple stages set outdoors
• The mix of popular themes, complex stories,
  acrobatic jumps and mellow love scenes made it
  highly influential throughout Europe

Harlequino
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Elizabethan Theatre 16th-17th C.

• Protestant Reformation closed down religious
  drama
• Tudor love of spectacle and patronage of drama
• Elizabethan poetry -- love of language
• Influenced by Roman theatre, Renaissance ideas,
  medieval stagecraft and pagan remnants
• Important theatrical period even if Shakespeare
  had never lived

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French Neoclassical Theatre, 17th-18th C.

• Modelled theatre on Greek and Roman examples
• Disdained English Elizabethan theatres
  messiness and eclecticism
• Neoclassical Conventions
• Decorum
• Verisimilitude
• Universal truths
• Poetic Alexandrines
• 5 act structure
• 3 unities time, place action

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Tragedy and Comedy

• Rulers/nobility
• Affairs of state
• Unhappy ending
• Lofty poetic style
• Revealed the horrible results of mistakes and
  misdeeds committed from passion
• Racine

• Middle class/bourgeosie
• Domestic/private affairs
• Happy ending often deus ex machina
• Ordinary speech
• Ridicules behavior that should be avoided
• Moliere

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German Romantic Theater 18th-19th C.

• Stürm und Drang
• Looked to Shakespeare for models
• Sweeping historical and tragic dramas
• Johann Goethe and Friedrich Schiller
• Began to emphasize historical accuracy in
  costumes and settings
• Improved theatrical effects -- footlights,
  revolving stages, theatrical machinery

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Melodrama 19th Century

• Theatre of sentimentality -- emotional appeal
• Heroes and villains -- and lily-white heroines
• Wide popular appeal
• Sensationalistic
• Most widely performed play of the 19th C Uncle
  Toms Cabin based on Harriet Beecher Stowes
  novel

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Realism and Naturalism19th-20th C.

• Intellectual reaction against popular theatre
• Theatre of social problems
• Influenced by emerging disciplines of psychology
  and sociology
• Emerging importance of director
• Realistic stage conventions
• Proscenium stage
• Audience as fourth wall
• Change in acting conventions
• Continued developments in stagecraft

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Realism and Naturalism

• Middle and Lower classes
• Sociological
• How does society/the environment impact
  individuals?
• Slice of life
• August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, John Synge,
  Sean OCasey

• Middle class
• Psychological
• How can the individual live within and influence
  society?
• Well-made play
• Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw

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20th Century Theatrea hundred years of isms

• Symbolism
• Expressionism
• Futurism
• Surrealism
• Social Realism
• Epic Theatre
• Existentialism
• Absurdism
• Magic Realism
• Hyper-Realism
• Not to mention musicals, films, street theatre,
  etc., etc.

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And so into the 21st Century
Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz Winner of 2003
Pulitzer Prize for Drama