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1. Revaluations of Virtues
- The University of Alabama Press
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1 Revaluations of Virtues Practically speaking, we want to resuscitate an idea of total spectacle by which the theater would recover from the cinema, the music hall, the circus, and from life itself what has always belonged to it. —Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double Ask folks to say what makes theater special and they will likely start by spouting something about the differences between stage and screen. Theater is live; film is in the can! But while the earliest films of the last century often did merely record theatrical performances by adopting the same point of view as the spectator in an auditorium, modern cinema discovered techniques so compelling and unique that it liberated itself as an art form and now dominates cultural discourse . The close-up, cut, montage, fade, and many such technologies have entered our collective consciousness and stolen theater’s former thunder by making moviegoing more intimate, more real, more palpably visceral than most live events. After first imitating theatrical conventions, cinema subsequently adapted, replaced, and surpassed them.1 At the dawn of a new millennium, one oftenrepeated question seems obvious again: Is theater dead? While it would be reassuring to say that this familiar trope is greatly exaggerated , I, like T wain, can’t shake my Missouri attitude and show-me state of mind. To refute the rhetorical question above requires a long, hard look at theatrical form with fresh eyes. I’m sick of the same old saws (live! live! live!) waxing theatrical virtues at the expense of film. Theater has no virtue! Is not the valorization of the stage as live—as opposed to mediated—entertainment a hackneyed, if not highly questionable, proposition? Is the endless human repetition of the same old thing eight times a week necessarily better than the mechanical reproduction of a spontaneous event performed once? The live event, too, is often billed as an intimate experience, but there’s no such thing as a close-up in the theater. How much intimacy can there be in a two-thousand-seat house? Theater trades on an aura of exclusivity, vainly seeing itself as an elite forum for serious issues and ideas, but how often does that privilege really translate into more exciting forms than mass-produced entertainment? The magic of theater, according to aficionados, lies in the interactive, though apparently unexplainable, relationship between performer and audience. Belief in such mysticism, however, 2 / Chapter 1 belies deep-rooted fears about the remarkable irrelevance of drama and theater in American society today. Does the fact that few people actually attend the theater prove its value? Seeking to revitalize perceptions of theater, I challenge its traditional virtues, using film as a foil, and champion a new critical paradigm. Rather than blindly accepting tired bromides about the theater, I choose to reappraise its characteristics in order to distinguish it truly from cinema. It’s time to ask new questions that clarify theater’s proper place and that void complacent attitudes about its significance. What things does theater do that film doesn’t? How do plays earn their place upon the stage? Rudolf Arnheim identified the formal attributes of cinema long ago in Film as Art and argued that problems, such as transposing the three-dimensional world onto a flat screen, sparked imaginative and creative solutions. Acknowledging the limitations of the medium, he suggested, opened a vast territory for exploration and innovation. No similar study has been devoted to drama and the theater. The brilliant eighteenth-century German critic and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whose Hamburg Dramaturgy rebelled against French Neoclassicism , also wrote Laocoön, subtitled “On the Limits of Painting and Poetry.” He didn’t address theater directly at all in this work, but rather compared and discussed the aims and capabilities of visual and linguistic art. He illustrated their differences with respect to depictions of beauty on canvas and in verse: Physical beauty arises from the harmonious effect of manifold parts that can be taken in at one view. It demands also that these parts shall subsist side by side; and as things whose parts subsist side by side are the proper subject of painting, so it, and it alone, can imitate physical beauty. The poet, who can only show the elements of beauty one after another, in succession , does on that very account forbear altogether the description of physical beauty, as beauty. He recognizes that those elements, arranged in succession, cannot possibly have the effect which they have...