The Dramatic Arts: Stage & Screen Copyright © 2000 Robert C. Huber
"But above all, theatre is the oldest way we have of trying to tell the truth about who we are."
Terrence McNally, playwrightTheatre: One of the Arts
Art is one of those words that we use regularly in casual conversation but when asked to define can be quite troublesome. Ultimately we may find ourselves backed into a corner saying something like the character in a famous New Yorker magazine cartoon: "Well, I may not know what art is, but I know what I like." Most people understand that art is a creative activity that is unique to humankind. Art is not valued for what it can do, but for what it represents. It is the product of an artist's attempt to express ideas and feelings about life to others that cannot be communicated in any other way. The serious study of art theory is called aesthetics. Aesthetics is to art what theology is to religion or philosophy is to life.
The world of art is divided into specific categories. Originally the classical arts consisted of music, dance, sculpture and painting, poetry (including dramatic poetry which was theatre), and architecture. Today photography may be included, whereas architecture is sometimes moved to another category: the practical or applied arts. When we speak of culinary arts, graphic arts, or the art of hairdressing we understand that these activities have as their primary purpose a practical function, not an aesthetic one. They may borrow some of the techniques of art, but they are not art as such. To clearly distinguish them from such applied arts, the classical arts are often referred to as fine arts. Today, the fine arts consist of dance, music, visual arts, and theatre. A further distinction is also made. Music, dance and theatre are created in front of an audience so are known as the performing arts. Theatre then is a performing art, one of the fine arts.
Each of the arts has a medium which distinguishes it from the others. The medium of dance is human movement, the medium of music is sound, and the media of sculpture may be stone, metal or wood. What then is the medium of theatre? It is human beings in the action of life. Most artists work primarily in one medium, but they do have to choose a subject each time they work. For the art photographer the subject may be anything within the field of the lens- animals, trees, clouds, people, or the chrome fender of a motorcycle. This extreme diversity of subject matter is true for all the visual arts, but less so for the performing arts, and not at all for the theatre. On stage there is only one subject: people. "But what about Cats?" you might well ask. Even when actors portray animals (or even trains as in Starlight Express) they are merely metaphors for people. After all, do cats sing, dance, and speak? Is anyone fooled into thinking that these are real cats on stage? Of course not. The intention is to use cats as an artistic lens through which to view some aspects of the human experience.The Nature of Dramatic Art
The art of the theatre is unique in several important ways. Perhaps the most important of these is its temporal nature. Temporal means that the work of art does not exist apart from the performance; it has a time dimension along with its spatial dimensions. It has this feature in common with the other performing arts of dance and music. A painting or sculpture may have the three common dimensions of height, width, and depth. But the performing arts can only exist in the fourth dimension of time as well. When a painting or art photo is finished it exists in all its fullness and completeness on the gallery wall; you don't have to wait for it to unfold before you. A snapshot taken of it will capture virtually all its information. However, if you walk into a performance of Phantom of the Opera and snap a photo, have you captured the play? In a similar way, to really know a piece of music you must sit and listen from beginning to end because it makes particular use of the time dimension as part of its art. The same is true of dramatic art.
Some people are mislead by the fact that plays, like novels, are published as books, and think that by reading the script they have experienced them. Novels are created for the purpose of being read, plays are not. Corollary to this is the fact that novels when acted out verbatim do not make good theatre because they are written differently. The script of a play bears the same relationship to the performance as a recipe does to a cake. The recipe contains all the information needed to create the pastry, but if you wad it up and put it in your mouth and chew it will not deliver the taste of chocolate. Reading a script cannot deliver full satisfaction. The script is merely a blueprint for the construction of a play using the materials of human action and emotion along with such physical properties as scenery, costume, and lighting. Moreover, it is the presence of the audience which is the final key ingredient of all performing arts. This is particularly true for theatre because its audience is not watching and listening to an abstraction like movement or sound, but human beings like themselves experiencing familiar moments of life.
Studio arts such as painting, sculpture, and photography are largely singular activities. That is, only a single artist is necessary to conceive and execute the work to completion. This not the case in dramatic art. Theatre is an interpretive art. The "first artist" of the theatre is the playwright. The playwright's work is then interpreted by the "second artist," the director, and finally by the "third artists," the actors and designers. Conductors, musicians, choreographers, and dancers are interpreters in their respective arts as well, but interpreters of theatre have much greater latitude for personal expression. This is true because the language of drama is much less exact than that of music or dance. Human life is much too complex for any system of notation to describe it completely. Playwrights have only the speech of their characters to carry all the information of a life lived. The interpreters are expected to fill in the blanks.
Finally, dramatic art is collaborative. As indicated above, dramatic art requires the services of many specialists to bring it to completion in performance. It is like a team sport in which each member has a specialty, but must work harmoniously with the others in order to win. To a much greater degree than any other of the performing arts, theatre is not pure. By that I mean that it is pure dramatic art only up to the point that the playwright completes the script. At that point other distinctly different arts must be wedded to it. Music, sound, and choreography, as well as the visual arts as expressed through scenery, lighting, costume, and make up, must all meld harmoniously and synergistically into a complete artistic whole. It might be said that theatre is an amalgam of arts around a core of dramatic art.
The Dramatic Arts in Our Time
As discussed in the Preface, for the vast majority of human history theatre has been synonymous with the stage. That is, if a person wanted to experience dramatic art, the stage-live actors before a live audience-was the only possibility. But with the coming of the twentieth century, certain technological developments were to finally change this forever. The first of these developments was photography which was perfected by the 1860s. You may have seen the work of pioneer photographer Matthew Brady who made the Civil War the first in history to have been documented by photographs. By the 1880s short moving pictures could be viewed in arcades called nickelodeons through an eyepiece on a box by means of a "flip-book" method. Yet the advent of photography offered little to the theatre until the mid-1890s when the Lumière brothers in France and Thomas Edison in the U.S. invented a moving strip of film and the means to project it onto a screen so that it could be viewed by an audience of more than one.
Film
At first, movies were little more than a side-show curiosity. In fact, vaudeville theatres showed short films as a part of an evening's otherwise live entertainments. The first motion picture to tell a complete story was Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery in 1903. With this step, the future of theatre was changed forever although few knew it at the time. This film, although it lasted only twelve minutes, had a fully developed story structure and used experienced stage actors. Within only a few years full-length feature films were beginning to capture the imagination, attention, and entertainment dollars of most Americans. Many in the stage industry scoffed at the new medium, considering it beneath their artistic standards. Others embraced it, following as it moved from New York to Hollywood by 1920.
Although early films did have a small negative impact on the popularity of the theatre, they lacked a key element that remained the preserve of the stage: sound. In an attempt to bridge this gap silent films used live music to underscore scenes, and title cards to communicate key dialogue and narration. The idea of musical underscoring was not a filmic innovation, but rather the adoption of a common feature of stage melodrama, one of the most popular kinds of nineteenth century plays. In his watershed book, From Stage to Screen, Nicholas Vardac has argued persuasively that film is merely an inevitable extension of melodrama and the staging practices of the nineteenth century. Yet, the lack of spoken dialogue meant that film could not achieve the literary sophistication made possible by the drama of the spoken word. Another technological development was to close this gap between film and the stage: radio.
Sound
Recording and playing back sound, particularly the human voice, was a long sought goal of nineteenth century science. Edison's phonograph (1877) achieved some of this goal, but without proper amplification it could not be heard from a distance or by a large group of people. A related goal was the sending of signals, especially the human voice, over long distances. The telegraph, the wireless radio, and finally the vacuum tube amplifier laid the groundwork for the ultimate addition of sound to film. The same technological breakthroughs that led to radio also made possible the synchronized recording and playback of sound on film. In 1928 the first sound film, The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson, was released and it was such a popular success that studios changed from silent to sound film almost overnight. Silent films that were already in production were hastily converted to sound midstream. Stage actors whose powerful trained voices could overcome the weaknesses of early microphones were suddenly in demand, whereas some established film actors who had not come from the stage and had poorly trained or odd sounding voices were soon out of work. Playwrights and stage directors were hastily recruited to deal with the new problems of dialogue. The coming of sound to film had simultaneously robbed the stage of one of its last advantages and drew the artists of the two mediums even closer together.
The stage enjoyed only one remaining obvious advantage over film: color. This too ended with developments in color photography being applied to motion picture film stock. The first major color film was Gone With The Wind in 1939.
Radio
Radio itself became a challenger for the attention of the national audience beginning with the first regular commercial broadcast in 1920. Radio's obvious advantages lay in convenience and cost. Soon mass production had made the price of radio sets low enough that most Americans could afford them. After a modest initial investment, the entertainment was free. Mr. and Mrs. America did not even have to leave the house to enjoy spoken word drama as well as many other types of programming. At the depth of the Great Depression in 1933 the cost advantage of radio made it the most popular form of entertainment of all. Radio drama is sometimes called "theatre of the mind" because it requires its audience to create in their heads images of what they are hearing. Radio fostered the development of serialized dramas: stories that continued each week. Even after the Depression radio continued its Golden Age into the early 1950s when a new medium ended its dominance: television.
By the 1930s national stage attendance was being seriously undercut by movies and radio, especially outside of the largest cities. It simply was not cost-effective to maintain live stage companies in cities with a small audience base. Even touring companies found it difficult to survive. Local theatrical producers could not compete with the big name stars appearing nightly at the local movie house. By the 1940s the dramatic arts had become polarized in that theatre production at the highest level had retreated to Broadway in the East, and film production was centered almost exclusively in Hollywood in the West.
Television
In a sense, television is an extension of radio. Radio created a format to which television merely added the visual dimension. In fact, many early television shows were moved directly from the radio to the television studio. Experimentation with television began in the late 1930s, but was halted due to World War II. At the end of the war, G.I.'s flooded back to an economically revitalized America. Many who could have never afforded college went to school under the G.I. Bill, others to high paying manufacturing jobs. The ensuing prosperity allowed for more leisure time and fueled a demand for consumer goods. The development of television was resumed and by the mid-1950s regular broadcasts were quickly overtaking radio as the mass medium of entertainment. Many in my generation can vividly remember the first time they saw a television program. Color was added in the 1960s and by 1975 nearly all Americans had a color t.v. in their homes. The addition of VCR's made television viewing even more convenient as well as drawing the film and television industries even closer through the video rental business.
So by the middle of the twentieth century the stage had its historical primacy challenged and eclipsed by modern media which were cheaper, more efficient, and more convenient. A rational person would have to conclude that under such conditions the theatre would simply be replaced in the same way automobiles replaced the horse and wagon. The stage must be an obsolete form, to be seen only in museums or read about in books. Yet, this is obviously not so. Theatre continues today as a billion dollar industry alongside its admittedly even more successful brethren. Why is this so? What does theatre have to offer that has not been replaced by something better? That is the subject of the next lecture.
Reading Assignment
You should be reading the Preface and Chapter 1 in your textbook to get more information about theatre.
Lecture Exercise
Give one example each of how film, radio, and television challenged theatre in the 20th century. A single sentence for each will suffice. Note: challenge implies doing something that theatre can't, or doing something theatre can do, but doing it better.
Oh, and please put these short Lecture Exercise answers in the body of the e-mail message, not in an attached document--it saves me some extra steps in grading and getting back to you.
Note that when submitting the answer start the subject line with:
TH101DE -- YourFirst&LastName -- L-2
Next lecture: The Modes of Drama