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I'm nearing the end! All I have left to do in my classes is take two finals tomorrow. And study for them today, but that's not a big deal. Yesterday, I turned in my final essay for Comparative Lit, so now I'm thinking about all the plays I read for that class this quarter.
The Good Person of Sichuan by Bertolt Brecht, Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, The Emperor Jones by Eugene O'neill, The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder, The Lesson by Eugene Ionesco, The Balcony by Jean Genet, Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, The Zoo Story by Edward Albee, Happy Days by Samuel Beckett, The Caretaker by Harold Pinter, Offending the Audience by Peter Handke, Biography: A Game by Max Frisch, and Indians! by Arthur Kopit.

Thirteen plays in ten weeks. My favourites, I think, were The Skin of Our Teeth, The Zoo Story, Offending the Audience, and Biography: A Game. I can't quite say what sets these apart. They're not all the most experimental or all the least, they're not all from the same country or language. Two American, one Austrian, one Swiss. I think they all just had certain qualities, whether of story or language, that I liked. The Skin of Our Teeth is cheerfully absurd, I liked something about the language in The Zoo Story, Offending the Audience just rolled so nicely, and Biography had a fascinating premise (the main character gets to go back and re-do his life like it's all a rehearsal for a play he's trying to perfect).

All these plays, though, are worth reading. Some of them wouldn't have struck me as experimental if I hadn't been told they were, but they all are. Something we spent a lot of discussion on in class was the theatrical illusion, and how it is broken or maintained in these plays. It's something to think about, if you ever read or see any of them.

I'm so glad I took this class. I started it out thinking myself extremely knowledgeable about theatre, just by loving it and having done a few plays, but there's a lot I don't know and a lot of plays I haven't read or seen, and the class taught me to push at the boundaries of what theatre is and what I expect from it.

20th Century Experimental Drama #4: Musings

This is a musing. It is inspired by my comparative literature class and all this experimental drama I've been reading, and it's something which is beginning to fascinate me, especially since NaNoWriMo is coming up and I may be doing some writing soon.

It has always been set up to me as the goal of literature, as what constitutes "good" fiction, as something to strive for in writing, that one should represent in fiction real human beings, with all their quirks, imperfections, and unpredictability. It never quite occurred to me that there was any other way to do it that was worth doing. For some reason it always stuck out to me that J.R.R. Tolkien disliked allegory, even before I entirely understood what allegory was. I suppose that is related to this.

But reading all these plays, I find something a little different. I find characters who are not quirky, who are often little more than their jobs, Mother, Lead Actress, Professor, Bishop. And by my default standards these characters should make up "bad" literature. Yet they don't.

What strikes me most about Brecht, Pirandello, O'neill, Wilder, Ionesco, and Genet is that they knew what they were doing. These plays feel deliberate. In writing these plays their authors had a goal, and they achieved that goal even if the characters or the plot never seem to get anywhere or end up back where they started. They choose a set of themes and these themes come through in both a subtle and a very bald way. Characters are manipulated to best set off the themes, and if human quirks of personality fall by the wayside, that's not a problem. You don't need to show every aspect of humanity because you are showing the exact aspects you set out to show. All this is done with skill, and this is what makes these plays good, what means they still get a whole quarter's class devoted to them in some cases nearly a century later.

In creating rounded, nuanced, human characters, you lose much of this deliberateness. Not only the characters but the entire work become human and messy. Is this better? Not necessarily. I've begun to realize that.

On the other hand, I still most often prefer to read about personalities. Humans fascinate me, and the fascinating parts can't always be conveyed in the thematically functional characters I've found in these plays. With most fiction it's the characters inside the story that hold the fascination. With these particular plays, the fascination comes in thinking about the author and what incredible and bizarre minds they must have had to create these stories.