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TRUTH AND DRAMATIC MODE IN THE MODERN THEATER: CHEKHOV, PIRANDELLO, AND WILLIAMS ANNOUNCING THE ARRIVAL OF TIlE PLAYERS at Elsinore, Polonius with glib facility and pride in his academic knowledge reels off the various dramatic kinds: "tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral ." Shakespeare is laughing at the pedants of his time and might find equally amusing the critics of modern drama who talk, Poloniuslike , of realistic, naturalistic, symbolic, epic, expressionistic, mythic, and poetic drama. But the situations are different. Where Polonius' recitation of dramatic kinds is mere sterile pedantry, since the Elizabethans had settled on and were developing the latent possibilities of a dramatic mode which both transcended and comprehended the schoolbook categories, the modern critic is forced to use and even multiply such clumsy and relatively imprecise terms as "natw'alism" and "expressionism " because the modem dramatists have been unable to find a satisfactory dramatic mode. The various dramatic "isms" are not in this case the inventions of dry academicians trying to reduce living works of art to a system which can be taught without effort in the classroom, but of critics trying dcsperately to describe and understand the restless, uneasy search for a dramatic modc which has characterized the tI,eater of the past hundred years. A few brief illustrations will have to serve here. Ibsen began as a writer of poetic drama and tI,en turned to writing realistic plays. But by the end of his career in an attempt to express his ideas, he had created a type of play in which the realistic framework remained, but \he life of the work was in symbols, e.g. The Master Builder and When ,Ve Dead Awal,e". Strindberg's fluctuations were even more violent. He began by writing eXh'emely naturalistic plays such as The Father and Miss Illlie, tllen wrote equally eX h'emely expressionistic plays snch as A Dream Play and To Damascus, and tI,en retw'ned once more to nahiralism. In recent years this search for mode appears most clearly in the plays of Tennessee ' Villiams where symbolism and realism are always juxtaposed. And Williams after writing a predominantly realistic play, A Streetcar Named Desire, turned to a . radically expressionistic mode in Camino Real. Very few modern playwrights have followed to the end the mode in which they began to work. One need tllink only of the plays of Hauptmann, Gorki, Piran101 102 ALVIN B. KERNAN September della, Lorca, Eliot, O'Neill, Kaiser, Brecht, and Sartre to realize that the individual author's search for a suitable mode is the history of modem drama as well. No sooner does one dramatic mode become established than a radically different kind appears, or several various kinds are yoked together in a new attempt to exp!ess adequately the modem world. This dramaturgical instability has inevitably been reflected in the allied theatrical arts. In acting the range is from Stanislavsky and the Moscow Art Theater on one hand to the tradition of the Abbey Theater, where actors were sometimes rehearsed in a barrel .in order to make them into mere voices for poetry; the names David Belasco and Gordon Craig suggest .the extent to which theories of scene design have varied; and in the construction of physical theaters we shift back and forth between the proscenium-atch stage of the •realistic theater, neo-Elizabethan platform stages, and theater-in-theround . ."This persistent and violent fluctuation in mode has not been confined to the modern theater, or even to modern literature. Concentrating on the visual arts, Andre Malraux in his The TWilight of the Absolute traces in detail the disintegration in the West over the past hundred years of any belief in "absolute form," i.e. a settled mode, and the appearance of a sensibility which responds to a variety of fOlms as diversified as a primitive fetish and a painting of Watteau. As a result of this broadening of sensibility the visual arts themselves reveal the same confusion of "forms" which is so typical of the modern theater. It is, according to Malraux, the loss of any belief in an "absolute" to which form gives expression that has...

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