Classical Greek Theatre: New Views of an Old Subject

5. The Scene House: The Dithyramb, Found Space, and the “Royal” Door

THE SCENE HOUSE The Dithyramb, Found Space, and the «Royal" Door Theatre begins in space created for something other than theatre. As the last of the arts to flower, theatre does not emerge until other institutions are in place and functioning; only then do the actors begin to infiltrate the buildings and structures originally intended for other purposes. A major part of theatre history concerns the adapting of found space for dramatic use: medieval drama began in the church; the first proscenium theatre, the Farnese, was created inside a riding arena; the Elizabethan theatre was born in bullbaiting pits and innyards; Inigo Jones' elaborate masques were housed in banqueting halls; both the French and English used tennis courts for theatres ; Max Reinhardt created a theatre within a Redoutensaal; Eugene O'Neill began on a New England wharfand graduated to a Greenwich Village stable; Richard Schechner housed his Dionysos in a parking garage. I directed my most recent productions in a vacant shopping center store, an abandoned movie house, a dance studio, and a large downtown building that once housed a men's clothier. How curious it is, then, that while tragedy is generally assumed to have evolved from some earlier performance mode, a usually unvoiced assumption maintains that the Greek theatre building was created specifically for the performance oftragedy. While it is true that theatron means "a seeing place," nothing specifies exactly what was to be seen. Even the prototypical Greek theatre imprinted on most minds, a conception based upon stone remains from the fourth century, shows little design affinity for the production of tragedies. A row of columns obscures whatever upstage entrance might have been present; DR and DL double doors sitting behind columned porches serve little purpose in staging the surviving plays; and the orchestra - the "dancing place" - is too large to be filled by only three actors and some dozen chorus members. Nonspeaking extras may have helped fill the stage picture in occasional scenes such as Agamemnon's homecoming; but still, this expanse seems constructed for a larger, more spectacular form of entertainment. If this is true, then tragedy was an afterthought, and actors had to make do with physical surroundings they had inherited rather than originated. TH E DITHYRAMB Although any event involving a substantial number ofparticipants might have found a suitable home in a large orchestra, the dithyrambic contest is the most obvious and probable original occupant of the Greek theatre. These annual competitions involved twenty choruses composed of fifty members each, plus musician(s). Such a large group, dressed in elaborate costumes (Demosthenes provided golden crowns for his entry), would have produced an eye-filling spectacle that filled a large expanse such as the orchestra presented. Evidence suggests that the earliest dithyrambs were brought to Corinth from Asia Minor around 600 BCE. Chronology muddies the case for the dithyramb as the original occupant of the theatre, since standard dating places the beginning of the Athenian dithyrambic contest some twenty-five years after the inauguration oftragic competition in 534 BCE. Dates for both dithyrambic and tragic contests are currently being questioned, but even if correct, they would not preclude the possibility that dithyrambic presentation began in Athens sometime before the competitions were established. The standard textbooks confidently assert that the first tragic competitions at the City Dionysia took place in 534 BC and included plays by the tragedian Thespis, that dithyrambs were added in 508 BC, and that comedies followed in 486 BC. This scenario has been repeated so often that it has become one of the few fixed points in the otherwise shifting sands of fragmentary evidence, legend, and hypothesis that constitute what we know of early tragic performances. Based on a probable misreading of an inscription on a marble slab called the Marmor Parium (found on the Greek island of Paros and shipped to London in AD 1627), the conclusion that the Great Dionysia was instituted in 534 BC by the tyrant Peisistratus hardly seems secure.} THE seE N E H a USE 63 John Winkler writes that «dithyrambic and comic choruses are much older than these particular festival arrangements, which simply give a new financial and competitive structure to old traditions." 2 Dithyrambs were not abandoned as plays gained popularity; Pickard-Cambridge points out that«performances ofdithyrambs were continually held in many parts ofGreece in the third and second centuries B.C., and even down to the third century A...