Mrs. Warren's Profession

Last night, I saw Gingold Theatrical Group’s wonderful production of Mrs. Warren’s Profession, now playing on Theatre Row.
 
As a production note points out, when Bernard Shaw first wrote the play in 1893, prostitution was already a crowd-pleasing plot point in numerous plays, including The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils. The fact that Mrs. Warren’s profession turned out to involve the sex trade was hardly controversial. What was controversial was to see a woman defend so vigorously her right to engage in that profession.
 
As the titular character Kitty Warren, Karen Ziemba does an excellent job portraying an unapologetic, ambitious, and fleshly woman who takes enjoyment in life no matter what others might think of her. Ziemba, who was delightfully airy as Hesione Hushabye in GTG’s production of Heartbreak House, could not be more different as Kitty Warren, who is grounded in an earthy worldliness throughout the play. The audience thoroughly enjoys every moment she is on the stage.
 
In many ways the more difficult role in the play is Kitty’s daughter Vivie, who is portrayed in this production by Nicole King, making her Off-Broadway debut. Raised in material comfort while ignorant of her mother’s profession, Vivie excels at mathematics at Cambridge and longs to get a job working in her own chambers in London. When she discovers the business her mother has fallen into, she reacts with understanding, but when she realizes her mother has never left that business, and participates in the exploitation of other women, she closes herself off from those around her, plunging into her own profession as diligently and enthusiastically as her mother had engaged in hers.
 
Director David Staller helps to fill out Vivie’s inner life in a theatrical moment when the other cast members speak in turns a line she has in the play. In this way, we see how the young woman’s world view has been shaped by all those around her, emphasizing over and over the notions that she internalizes, for better or for worse. “I don’t believe in circumstances,” she says, “The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.” The fact that we hear these lines not just in Vivie’s voice, but in the voices of the rest of the cast, demonstrates that no matter what she may claim, Vivie is a product of her own circumstances, like it or not.
 
In addition to the two leading women, the supporting cast is excellent as well. Raphael Nash Thompson, the brilliant Captain Shotover in GTG’s Heartbreak House, plays the Rev. Samuel Gardner, and the relative newcomer David Lee Huynh is a delight as Gardner’s son (and Vivie’s love interest) Frank. Robert Cuccioli, who played Julius Caesar in GTG’s Caesar and Cleopatra, brings depth to the villainous baronet Sir George Crofts, and Alvin Keith is a breath of fresh spring air as the romantic and artistic architect Mr. Praed.
 
Mrs. Warren’s Profession is playing until November 20th, so get your tickets now! You won’t want to miss it.

The Importance of Being in the Park

This year, The Public Theater is producing three big-budget plays at the Delacorte in Central Park: Much Ado About Nothing, Coriolanus, and a stage adaptation of the Disney movie Hercules, the last of the three done as part of the theater's Public Works program. However, there are plenty of other great shows to see in the parks this summer, including New York Classical Theatre's delightful new production of The Importance of Being Earnest.

Last night, I saw the classic Oscar Wilde comedy at the north end of in Central Park. Ushers greet you at the entrance at 103rd Street and Central Park West. Bring a blanket or a low folding chair, but make sure it's easy to carry, as you'll be moving from place to place. Each act is performed at a different location around the pond.

And be prepared for a potential surprise. I saw the show with the manly Ademide Akintilo playing Algernon while the charmingly feminine Connie Castanzo played Cecily. However, every other performance, they switch roles, so he plays Cecily, and she plays Algernon. All the other cast members switch roles as well, so every other performance is gender-swapped, which must be rather interesting, to say the least.

The Importance to Being Earnest is only playing until June 16th in Central Park. From June 18th to 23rd, the production will move to Brooklyn Bridge Park at Pier 1. Then, from June 25th through 30th, they'll be at Carl Schurz Park at East 86th Street in Manhattan. You can get more information and sign up for rain cancellation notices here.

Wherever you see it, and whether with a traditional cast or with the roles reversed, do make sure you get to the show. The cast, which includes Jed Peterson and Kristen Calgaro as Jack and Gwendolen, and Tina Stafford and Clay Storseth as Miss Prism and Dr. Chasuble, is excellent. I saw Kate Goehring as a wonderful Lady Bracknell and John Michalski as a deadpan Merriman, but they might be just as good when they switch roles!

William Shakespeare is a perennial favorite for outdoor productions, and tomorrow night Hudson Warehouse is opening a new production of Antony and Cleopatra at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park at 89th Street. As is the case with New York Classical Theatre, they pass a basket, and it's pay-what-you-can. Starting July 4th in the same location, Hudson Warehouse will be putting on a stage adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel The Man in the Iron Mask, and in August they'll be back to Shakespeare with The Merry Wives of Windsor.

If Coriolanus and The Merry Wives of Windsor aren't your cup of tea, and you're looking for more familiar Shakespeare territory, Black Henna Productions is doing Hamlet, Viking Prince of Denmark in parks throughout Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn this month. Also, Smith Street Stage will be doing Romeo and Juliet in Carroll Park, and starting in July Hip to Hip Theatre Company will be doing traveling productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Richard III.

For those who are tired of work by that upstart crow Shakespeare, The Classical Theatre of Harlem is doing a real classic, The Bacchae by Euripides this July in Marcus Garvey Park. Last summer, they did a great job with Sophocles's Antigone, so it should be worth seeing, and once again, donations are appreciated, but there is no admission charged. For those who complain that theatre is too expensive in New York, this summer offers an appropriate response.

Notes on Realist Drama

The Failure of '48

In 1848, the Romantic spirit erupted in revolutions throughout Europe. Though some fighting had already begun in Sicily, the upheavals began in earnest in February with a revolt in France that toppled the moderate King Louis Philippe and established a French Republic for the first time since the ascension of Napoleon. Revolutions soon swept through Italy, Germany, Denmark, and the Austrian Empire. The Irish rose up against British rule, and England itself narrowly escaped revolution when a protest of more than 100,000 people in London ended with a peaceful petition for greater reform.

One after another, however, the revolutions collapsed. Pope Pius IX, once viewed as a potential champion of Italian independence, sided with reactionaries, setting back the unification of Italy by more than two decades. Czar Nicholas I came to the aid of the Austrian empire and sent hundreds of thousands of troops who aided in imposing martial law. Polish fighters failed miserably in their attempt to resurrect their country, which had been partitioned in the eighteenth century. Across Germany, scores of uprisings collapsed, and liberals went into exile, many of them fleeing to the United States. A year that began with such hope for change ended with many progressives falling into despair.

Though moderate reforms sometimes gained ground, the forces of conservatism largely restored the status quo, often with great bloodshed. Even France's new republic did not last long. Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, a nephew of the former emperor, staged a coup in 1851, ending constitutional rule. He later crowned himself emperor, taking the name Napoleon III out of deference to Napoleon's son who never actually ruled. Instead of moving forward, history seemed to be comically inverting itself.  The political change young intellectuals across the continent had hoped for seemed an illusion.

In one of the last uprisings of the movement, the people of Dresden rose up against the King of Saxony in 1849. Among then was the young composer Richard Wagner. Banished after the failure of the revolt, Wagner wrote that the revolution must be carried out by other means. Not only Wagner, but artists of all kinds turned to the theatre as a means to change society in ways that arms and violence had failed. The Romantic dreaming of the past half century had ended in ruins, so many people believed the theatre should return to cold, hard facts, presented as realistically as possible.

The Box Set

One of the most important elements of the new, more realistic aesthetic of the theatre was the box set. The actress and theatre manager Lucia Elizabeth Vestris, better known as Madame Vestris, first introduced London audiences to this new technique of stage design in 1832 at the Olympic Theatre. The box set presents a room with a floor, ceiling, and three fixed walls, as if it were a real room with an imaginary fourth wall removed. The side walls and ceiling typically slope back away from the audience, so a box set is not an exact reproduction of a room, but it comes close. A few theatres in Europe had experimented with lashing together a few flats to create something approximating a box set, but the designs introduced by Vestris outdid anything that had been seen previously.

Together with her husband, the actor Charles Mathews, Vestris later took over the Covent Garden Theatre. That was where she introduced even more elaborate box sets for the 1841 premiere of London Assurance, a comedy by the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault. The play frequently calls for the actors to speak directly to the audience, a technique that later became known as "breaking the fourth wall." London Assurance only has one setting per act, a tradition the box set helped to solidify. While backdrops could be quickly lifted up into a theatre's fly space, box sets were cumbersome to change, meaning scene changes were often limited to intermissions.

After finding success with London Assurance, Boucicault worked on both sides of the Atlantic, continuing to write plays that exploited elaborate set designs. He adapted the French play The Poor of Paris as The Poor of New York, sometimes known as The Streets of New York, which debuted in 1857. Boucicault reset the play during a recent financial crisis and used place names that were familiar to New Yorkers. The climactic scene took place in a tenement in Five Points, the worst neighborhood in the city. The building spectacularly went up in flames on stage in full view of the audience.

Returning to England, Boucicault changed all of the local references and presented the play in Liverpool as The Poor of Liverpool, and later in London as The Streets of London. Rewriting plays to suit the tastes of local audiences became a hallmark of Boucicault's drama. In 1859, on the eve of the U.S. Civil War, he wrote the slavery melodrama The Octoroon, which managed to win popularity with Northerners and Southerners alike. The plot involves a white man in love with the title character, who is one-eighth black and legally a slave. In the U.S., many people considered such a "mixed" relationship unthinkable, so the heroine tragically died in the end. British audiences had no such qualms, so in 1861 he presented the play in London with a new, happy ending.

While Boucicault was busy writing and rewriting plays based on spectacle, Vestris quietly built up her own theatrical style. She banished the public from actors' dressing rooms and moved curtain times earlier so families could attend. Both of these reforms made the theatre more respectable. Even more importantly, she insisted on realistic sets, so that, in the words of her actor husband, "Drawing rooms were fitted up like drawing rooms." Other theatre artists praised her for her scrupulous attention to detail that helped to perfect a new style of theatrical illusion. However, Vestris could only do so much with hackney plays by the likes of Boucicault. For true realism, the theatre needed more than just box sets.

The Well-Made Play

By the middle of the nineteenth century, many playwrights, especially in France, were championing a tighter, more streamlined form of drama in which logic dictated the plot rather than a desire for spectacular stage effects. The French dramatist Eugéne Scribe set the standard for these new plays with his 1842 comedy The Glass of Water. Like many Romantic dramas, the play is set in an earlier historical epic, but instead of presenting a sweeping history drama, as Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas had done, Scribe reduced the affairs of nations to trivialities. What is more, he had the entire plot hang upon the seemingly minor act of the queen asking for a glass of water. Because the plots of Scribe and his followers were so tightly constructed, their works became known as well-made plays.

Sometimes, well-made plays took on important social issues. This was the case of the 1852 drama Camille by Dumas' son, who is known as Alexandre Dumas, fils. Camille tells the tragic story of a virtuous courtesan in love with a young man. She leaves him for his own good, but the two reunite by the end, when she dies of consumption (tuberculosis). Giuseppe Verdi adapted the play as the opera La Traviata, which opened the following year.

Camille questions conventional morality, but more often well-made plays confirmed the status quo. This was the case of the1855 play Olympe's Marriage by Émile Augier. Angier's play inverts the story of Camille, making the courtesan a scheming villainess. In the finale, a nobleman shoots the sinful woman in righteous indignation, declaring that God is his judge. For decades, these more conventional dramas dominated the stage. Even when important issues like slavery arose, such as in the spectacular stage adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, virtuous and villainous characters remained clearly demarcated as a way to help the audience enjoy the action rather than having to think seriously about complex issues.

Well-made plays frequently emphasized important stage props, as was the case in A Scrap of Paper, the 1860 comedy by Victorien Sardou. Sardou's characters seem less like people and more like cogs in a machine as they relentlessly chase the titular scrap of paper, a lost love letter, throughout the play, nearly burning it, throwing it out the window, and using it as blackmail. Sardou later wrote the play Tosca as a vehicle for the actress Sarah Bernhardt. As the play's protagonist was an opera singer, the composer Giacomo Puccini logically turned the piece into a popular opera. In spite of Sardou's popularity, however, some found his plots to be too neatly constructed, and the critic (and later playwright) George Bernard Shaw derided such plays, coining the ridiculous word Sardoodledom to connote a mechanically contrived and trivial play.

The German playwright Gustav Freytag wrote few lasting plays of merit, but he composed one of the most important manuals on how to construct a well-made play. In his 1863 book The Technique of the Drama, Freytag laid out a prescriptive structure for plots. Known as Freytag's Pyramid, this structure begins with exposition, in which the audience receives important background information, often through unlikely conversations between minor characters. The exposition is followed by rising action, in which the play's excitement builds toward the climax, which is the peak of the audience's interest. After the climax comes falling action in which the chief conflict unravels. The play then ends with the final resolution, which Freytag described using the French term dénoument. Though Freytag's plays never caught on, his dramatic theory had a long-lasting impact on later writers.

The Total Work of Art

In 1849, following the failed Dresden uprising, the young revolutionary and composer Richard Wagner published a long essay entitled "The Artwork of the Future." Wagner had already established a reputation with such operas as The Flying Dutchman, but the essay looked forward to a new art form that would go beyond the music-centered world of traditional opera. He advocated a new form of "music drama" which would be a "Gesamtkunstwerk" or "total work of art" arising out of the collective consciousness of "the people." Dance, tone, and poetry would all become one. There would no longer be separate arts, but one art, uniting all the others in a single vision.

Wagner tried to put his ideas into practice by writing both the music and lyrics of a massive four-opera cycle known as The Ring of the Nibelungen and then attempting to stage all four operas himself. Based loosely on Norse mythology, the opera's showed the gods building their homeland of Valhalla, disputing with one another, witnessing the rise of a hero, and then ultimately being destroyed, as Valhalla goes up in flames. To contain this epic drama, Wagner envisioned a special festival house designed specifically for its performance. Gaining the support of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner finally got his theatre, and in 1876 he staged the entire cycle in a specially designed opera house in the town of Bayreuth. No one had ever seen anything like it.

The Bayreuth Festival Theatre was purposefully built with few ornaments so as not to distract the audience from the stage. Wagner made sure the seats were laid out in a democratic fashion with no galleries or box seats, so that everyone got a good view of the action. A special double proscenium made the stage appear further back than it actually was, and a recessed orchestra pit created what Wagner called a "mystic gulf" between the stage and the audience. Advances in lighting allowed Wagner to place the audience in complete darkness, something that had never been done in the past. Lavish costumes and sets transported the scene to a realm that was mythic and magical, but he had each detail crafted with painstaking realism.

Today, the Bayreuth Festival continues to operate, bringing tens of thousands of people to the theatre every summer. Though many of Wagner's dreams never materialized precisely as he envisioned them, he has had a profound impact on the theatre. Wagner helped to codify the separation of the audience from the action of the play, solidifying the metaphorical "fourth wall." He also introduced technical innovations in lighting, sets, and theatre design that became standard practice in the late nineteenth century. Most importantly, he showed how powerful theatre could be when all elements, words, music, acting, lighting, set and costume design, together worked toward a common artistic vision.

Wagner was not the only theatre artist to work towards such a vision, or even the only one in Germany. Unlike Wagner, Georg II, the Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, had no need for noble patronage, as he was a noble himself, taking over a powerful duchy in 1866 upon the abdication of his father. The Duke took over the Meiningen Ensemble and introduced numerous reforms aimed at making plays more realistic and historically accurate. He had seen the antiquarian productions of Shakespeare that Charles Kean had staged in London, and the Duke wanted to take Kean's verisimilitude to a new level. For eight years, he maintained a vigorously trained company dedicated to performing a repertory of classic plays.

In 1874, the duke took his plays on the road, exhibiting his cutting-edge productions first in Berlin, then through Russia, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Britain. The company gave thousands of performances throughout Europe, frequently putting local theatres to shame. Audiences were shocked not just by the historical accuracy of the sets and costumes, but by the way the ensemble of actors worked together as a unit. There were no stars in the Duke's company. When an actor was not cast in a leading role, he or she had to appear onstage in a minor part or as a supernumerary, one person in a crowd of others.

Those crowd scenes particularly impressed audiences. In the Duke's production of Julius Caesar, crowds wearing Roman togas acted not as a mob, but as a host of individual characters, each with his or her own unique blocking. The effect was a single, unified production, but with each element, each action, planned out to serve the play. Because the company traveled widely over the course of 16 years, theatre artists from all over Europe saw the productions, and they were invariably influenced by what they saw. A generation of new artists then sought to create a new type of theatre, one that, like Wagner's, was dominated by a single, all-controlling vision.

Ibsen

The first practitioner of what we now think of as modern drama was also one of the last of the Romantics. The Norwegian poet Henrik Ibsen was living in a self-imposed exile in Italy when in 1865 he wrote a verse tragedy called Brand about an uncompromising Christian minister. Ibsen never meant for the piece to be performed, but its inherent theatricality led to its premiere two years later in Sweden and to Ibsen's gaining wide spread acclaim. The same year that Brand received its first performance, Ibsen wrote an even more ambition verse drama, Peer Gynt, about a charismatic con man who is the opposite of the protagonist in Brand. Though Peer Gynt was far too long to be performed in its entirety, from the 1870s on it became a staple of the international repertoire, aided by incidental music Edvard Grieg composed especially for the piece.

After writing the two greatest verse dramas in his native language, Ibsen abandoned writing plays in verse and composed his next two plays, The League of Youth and Emperor and Galilean, in prose. The first was a satire on the small-mindedness of modern politicians while the later was a sprawling historical drama about the conflict between Paganism and Christianity in the Roman Empire. Having outgrown Romanticism, Ibsen had not yet found a new way to talk about the important issues of humanity in a way that spoke to the concerns of the modern era. Moving to Munich, Ibsen wrote The Pillars of Society, a play that feels at home in a box set and draws upon many elements of the well-made play. However, it brought together elements of comedy, melodrama, and satire into a coherent whole, presenting a unified vision of the corruption at the heart of the modern world.

More than any other author, Ibsen became associated with the new style of Realism. In Ibsen's hands, Realism did not just present the world as it appeared on the surface, it also probed deeper into the underlying issues of society in general. Ibsen portrayed characters with complex psychologies, who seemed like actual people one might meet in real life. At the same time, these characters groped with the fundamental issues of human existence--life, death, love, injustice--in a way that made them rise above the banality of everyday life. Though Ibsen's world appears as real as our own, audiences are acutely aware of the fact that there is more on stage than meets the eye.

Ibsen's 1879 play A Doll House exemplified this new aesthetic, and simultaneously caused a considerable uproar. The play portrays a middle-class woman who abandons her husband and children, slamming the door behind her. Some actresses refused to perform the ending as written, and Ibsen grudgingly wrote an alternative ending in order to forestall hack writers from coming up with their own, even more watered-down endings. Critics attacked Ibsen's next play, Ghosts, even more fiercely, calling it "a dirty act done publicly," "blasphemous," and "as foul and filthy a concoction as has ever been allowed to disgrace" the theatre. While newspapers attacked Ibsen for openly discussing venereal disease onstage, they dared not address the play's truly shocking revelation that a young man is in love with his half-sister.

While Ghosts is steeped in the imagery of disease, Ibsen was far more concerned with the ethical diseases of a society unwilling or unable to deal with the darker side of human nature. He turned to pollution as a metaphor for this same social corruption in his next play An Enemy of the People. By turns comic and tragic, the play shows a doctor hailed as a savior when he reveals that pollution is tainting the town's water. Once it becomes apparent that news of the contamination could hurt the town's reputation as a tourist destination, however, the citizens turn on him and his family, trying to drive them from their home. Many critics have taken the play as a response to criticism of Ghosts, but Ibsen's wide-ranging critique of democratic societies transcends any particular feuds over plays or pollution.

The next four plays of Ibsen, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, The Lady from the Sea, and Hedda Gabler, have even more complex characters. The psychological realism with which he portrays people can be painful to watch. Hedda Gabler, which Ibsen completed in 1890, pushes Realism to its limits, placing onstage not just a couple of historians, but seemingly the forces that drive history as well. The plot of the play revolves in part around a book about the future, and in Ibsen's later plays, he reached out toward the future of art, ultimately moving beyond the Realism he had helped to establish. Even the solidly realistic plays of Ibsen were too much for many professional theatres to take, and to perform them, sympathetic artist had to find a whole new way of staging plays.

The Independent Theatre Movement

Theatre was particularly stultified in France during the latter half of nineteenth century. The official state theatre, the Comédie Française, kept its stranglehold on serious drama, while the popular houses, known as boulevard theatres, stuck to maudlin melodramas and light-weight farces. These included the works of Georges Feydeau, who in 1882 had his first big hit with the farce Through the Window, and would later pen such classic comedies as A Flea in Her Ear. Paris had a number of small amateur theatre groups, however, some of which did quite fine work. In 1887, an obscure clerk named André Antoine quit his amateur theatre troupe because it wouldn't produce a play he wanted it to do. French theatre would never be the same.

Antoine founded his own theatre, known as the Théâtre Libre, which was open only to audiences who signed up for a special subscription. By organizing his theatre as a private club, Antoine avoided censorship laws. He immediately began staging important new plays, including The Power of Darkness by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. After seeing the Meiningen Ensemble, he made his productions increasingly realistic. In 1890, he put on Ibsen's Ghosts, and the following year The Wild Duck. Critics flocked to see his productions, and word quickly spread about the bold new style Antoine championed.

In addition to performing Realist works, the Théâtre Libre became known for championing an even more extreme style known as Naturalism. The novelist Émile Zola considered Naturalism to be a scientific approach to literature that focused on heredity, environment, and the most basic impulses of human beings. Zola adapted his own novel Therese Raquin as a play in 1873, and Antoine later staged numerous adaptations of Zola's work at the Théâtre Libre. More gifted as a playwright than Zola was the Swedish writer August Strindberg. After writing his first great Naturalist play, The Father, Strindberg set to work on a new play with Antoine's theatre specifically in mind. Antoine did in fact later stage that play, Miss Julie, which became a classic due to its fierce and uncompromising portrayal of two people caught up in a ferocious downward spiral of sex and violence.

Companies all over Europe tried to reproduce the success of Antoine's Théâtre Libre. Strindberg himself founded the short-lived Scandinavian Experimental Theatre, together with his first wife, the actress Siri von Essen. In 1889, the theatre put on Miss Julie with von Essen in the title role. With this new theatre in mind, Strindberg wrote the short play The Stronger, which was intended to be a vehicle for his wife. Unfortunately, neither the theatre nor the marriage lasted long thereafter.

The same year Strindberg premiered Miss Julie, another independent theatre was founded in Berlin. German theatre artists who worked all over the city came together on Sundays, when they had the day off from more official theatres, so they could put on the types of plays they really wanted to perform. The theatre was known as the Freie Bühne--German for "Free Stage"--and operated as a democratic collective, though its first president, Otto Brahm, helped to guide it for years. The company performed the plays of Ibsen, as well as those of the German Naturalist playwright Gerhart Hauptmann. Hauptmann is best known for The Weavers, which told the true story of a labor uprising that had happened during the Industrial Revolution.

Britain took more time to open up to this new way of staging plays, but in 1891 the drama critic Jacob Grein founded the Independent Theatre Society, which brought Antoine's subscription model to London. Free of censorship laws, the new society opened with a production of Ghosts. Grein asked his fellow critic George Bernard Shaw, who was famous for mocking the popular plays of the London stage, to provide one of his own works for the society. Shaw obliged him with Widowers Houses, a play that examines the issue of slum landlords in a way that implicates nearly everyone as part of the problem. As if that weren't enough, Shaw followed the play up with Mrs. Warren's Profession, a play about both prostitution and feminism, and Arms and the Man, which attacked romanticized notions of war.

Over his long career, Shaw would go on to write clever comedies (You Never Can Tell, Major Barbara, Pygmalion), historical dramas (The Devil's Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, Saint Joan), and highly philosophical plays (Man and Superman, Heartbreak House, Back to Methuselah). His immense popularity showed that the new theatre that had begun on small, independent stages had now become mainstream. Realism became the style of the establishment, and new rebels would rise up against it, demanding new forms. Even as these new revolts were stirring, two men on the other side of Europe were creating what would become the single most influential theatre for the next hundred years. The men were Constantin Stanislavski and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and the company they founded in 1898 was The Moscow Art Theatre.

Stanislavski and Nemirovich-Danchenko were both committed to an unprecedented devotion to Realism down to the smallest detail. Their first big hit at the Moscow Art Theatre was The Seagull, a play by Anton Chekhov that had previously flopped. Under the direction of Stanislavski, however, the play was a triumph. Stanislavski continued to both direct and act in Chekhov's future works, including Uncle Vanya, The Three Sisters, and The Cherry Orchard. Though Chekhov saw all of these plays as comedies, Stanislavski directed them with an intense earnestness.

After the Russian Revolution, Stanislavski published many of his thoughts on acting and traveled widely, sharing his technique with actors and directors around the world. His teachings, particularly as recorded in the book An Actor Prepares, became a new standard for acting all over the world. Stanislavski's Realist method became known simply as "the method." Realism, seemingly, had triumphed.

The Evolution of Madame de Staël

Anne Louise Germaine Necker was an odd fish. Her parents were Swiss Protestants who settled in Paris in the mid-eighteenth century. The year after she was born, her father went into politics, eventually rising to become the Minister of Finance for King Louis XVI.

Did I mention that her dad was Jacques Necker? You know, the financial genius who did everything he could to save Louis's rear end, and whose dismissal by the king helped to precipitate the French Revolution? Yeah, that Jacques Necker.

And her mom? That would be Suzanne Curchod. She used to hang out with Diderot, and she exchanged letters with Rousseau and Voltaire. Edward Gibbon wanted to marry her, but she pretty much turned him down.

So with those two as your parents, it's probably hard to not be a genius. (Especially when you're an only child and your brilliant father dotes on you all the time.)

When she was 20, Germaine married the Swedish ambassador to Paris, Eric Magnus Staël-Holstein. They split after a couple of years, but she took his name, becoming known to history as Madame de Staël.

Madame de Staël published--under her own name--some rather radical little pieces right before the Revolution. She had to flee the Reign of Terror, but she returned to France after the fall of Robespierre and wrote a fascinating book called The Influence of Literature on Society. With this work of literary criticism, de Staël broke with traditional French Enlightenment thinking and began a journey along the road to Romanticism.

The Influence of Literature on Society holds that the rules of good taste are not arbitrary, but are based on "universal truths" that are "unanimously approved by all mankind." The book claims local customs often force authors of genius to depart from good taste, but that these minor errors in style should not obscure the greatness of works tainted by barbarous (read, non-French) customs.

The great example of this, of course, was Shakespeare. In her chapter on Shakespearean Tragedy, de Staël writes:

In Shakespeare there are beauties of the first order which appeal to all nations and all epochs. In Shakespeare there are also flaws which may be attributed to the Elizabethan period and peculiarities which are so popular with the English that they continue to have success on the English stage.

She claims that Shakespeare is superior to the Greeks in his portrayal of the passions, but inferior to them in terms of artful composition, citing "dull patches, useless repetitions, and incoherent images." The reason for these flaws, she claims, was that Will had to write for an ignorant audience. One gets the sense she thinks that if Shakespeare had only written for more civilized, French theatre goers, then his plays would have been perfect.

Later on in the book, de Staël links the style of Shakespeare and other English writers with the authors of Germany, theorizing about a type of imaginative literature emanating from the northern countries of Europe. While she does not prefer this literature to that of France, she recognizes its power, and she admits that highly structured French verse cannot always contain the deepest feelings of human passion. Ultimately, the book advocates "an intermediate genre between the decorum of the French poets and defects in taste of the Northern writers."

In 1800, de Staël still couldn't get beyond seeing Shakespeare--and other "Northern" writers--as being somehow defective. Perhaps writing her own imaginative works helped to change her mind. In 1802, de Staël published Delphine, an epistolary novel examining the roles of upper class women. She returned to France the next year, but she got in hot water with Napoleon and ended up touring Germany with her lover, a fellow Swiss-French writer names Benjamin Constant.

Now that she was spending some serious time in Germany, de Staël's feelings about that country and its literature began to change. She saw Goethe's theatre in Weimar and met Schlegel in Berlin. She then took a tour of Italy and wrote a new novel, Corinne. It was in 1810 that she wrote her second important piece of criticism: Germany.

Napoleon ordered all copies of the book destroyed. Three years later, she was able to have the book republished in London. What was it that made this book, more than Corinne, more than Delphine, more than The Influence of Literature on Society, so dangerous to the French Empire?

As de Staël points out in the book, many people in France had come to use the term "classical" as a synonym for perfection. French art was "classical" because it was based on Greek and Roman models. "Romantic" art by contrast had its origins in the songs of the troubadours of the chivalric age. In Germany, de Staël had the nerve to say that "classical" art wasn't necessarily the best way to go. In one passage she observed:

French poetry, being the most "classical" of all modern poetry, is the only modern poetry not familiar to the people. The stanzas of Tasso are sung by the gondoliers of Venice; Spaniards and Portugese of all classes know the verses of Calerdon and Camoëns by heart. Shakespeare is as much admired by the common folk of England as by the upper classes. Poems of Goethe and Bürger are set to music and can be heard from the banks of the Rhine to the Baltic. Our French poets are admired by the cultivated classes of France and the rest of Europe, but they are completely unknown to the common people, and to the middle class, even of the cities.

Thus, Germany linked all of French literature to the old aristocratic regime, and it associated foreign literatures with egalitarianism, which the Revolution had allegedly championed.

Madame de Staël was particularly biting when it came to drama. She attacked the French for holding fast to the unities of time and place when unity of action was the only one that really mattered. She did not advocate that French playwrights should adopt the methods and models of the Germans, but she welcomed foreign plays as a way to generate new ideas

Friedrich Schiller's Wallenstein trilogy seems to have greatly moved her. She noted that German audiences watching the play did not mind lingering over lengthy scenes, appreciating the feelings of the characters rather than only being on the lookout for the plot. She expressed a desire to see Wallenstein on the French stage, but she added that the play demanded a "youthful spirit" that many in France lacked.

Acting in France was too bound by what de Staël described as "the art of declamation." She praised German actors, such as August Wilhelm Iffland, as well as the British actor David Garrick. The French actor she most admired was François-Joseph Talma, who found new ways of acting old scenes in order to breath fresh life into them. She concluded a long digression on Talma by saying:

The artist gives as much as is possible to French tragedy of what, justly or unjustly, the Germans accuse it of lacking: originality and naturalness. He knows how to characterize foreign manners in the diverse plays in which he acts, and no actor hazards greater effects by simple means. In his declamation Shakespeare and Racine are artistically joined. Why won't dramatists also attempt to unite in their compositions what the actor has so well combined in his acting?

Germany was more than mere literary criticism. It included a manifesto for a new type of dramaturgy. Napoleon, who had limited the number of theatres in Paris and sought to tightly regulate drama, would have none of that. But all the Napoleons in the world couldn't keep de Staël's successors, including romantic playwrights Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, from ultimately conquering the French stage.

Meditations on de Certeau

I've been reading the work of the French historian and philosopher Michel de Certeau and realizing how much of an impact he's had on theatre scholars, particularly Stephen Greenblatt. Born in 1925, de Certeau already had degrees in classics and philosophy when he decided to become a Jesuit priest. He spoke of doing missionary work in China, but instead ended up getting a doctorate from the Sorbonne, a secular university. While there, he studied religious figures, Pierre Favre and Jean-Joseph Surin. This mingling of the religious and the secular continued throughout de Certeau's career.

His first major book, The Possession at Loudun, was an attempt to understand history. The piece deals with a specific event from the seventeenth century involving the supposed demonic possession of a group of Ursuline nuns. Numerous authors, from Alexandre Dumas to Aldous Huxley, had already created fictional accounts of the story. In his book, de Certeau specifically linked the possessions and exorcisms in Loudun to the theatre. Both possession and exorcism became in de Certeau's view a "show" that was performed for the public.

The Possession at Loudun had particular impact on Greenblatt, one of the pioneers of New Historicism. Greenblatt's 1988 book Shakespearean Negotiations also delves into the theatrical nature of exorcism, and Greenblatt specifically references de Certeau's work as one of his sources. For Greenblatt and other New Historicists, de Certeau pointed to an approach to history that recognized the past as profoundly strange and alien to us in the present. As a critic of all society, not just history, de Certeau saw the strangeness of history manifest even in the present day. As he wrote in The Possession at Loudun, "strangeness is deeply rooted in the substance of a society."

Images of the possessed crop up repeatedly in de Certeau's writings. In The Writing of History, he again delves into the theatrical nature of possession, showing how in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries demonic possession paralleled the creation of theatre. In both cases, epistemological, political, and religious questions of the period were acted out on a public stage, whether that stage was metaphorical or literal. His emphasis on possession as performance might seem to anticipate performance studies. However, his name is much more often linked to the discipline of cultural studies, and in particular to ways in which individuals can resist the hegemony of the dominant culture.

Never purely a historian, de Certeau later took his critical analysis of history and applied it to the most mundane actions of the present with his book The Practice of Everyday Life. Like the work of Stuart Hall, The Practice of Everyday Life challenges notions that mass culture is a monolithic force imposed on individuals. The book argues that individuals alter and individualize elements of mass culture to make them their own. In re-using both symbols and physical objects for their own purposes, individuals can challenge and subvert the ideologies a broader culture seeks to impose upon them.

An example he gives in The Practice of Everyday Life is an individual walking through a city that has been laid out by urban planners. In spite of the most thorough designs, individuals always seem to find short cuts and detours that planners never anticipated. He writes about how looking down from the top of the World Trade Center "makes the complexity of the city readable." However, that clarity is only an illusion. According to de Certeau, the people who actually walk through a city "follow the thicks and thins of an urban 'text' they write without being able to read it."

In 1982, de Certeau published the first volume of The Mystic Fable, an unfinished work that explores the history of Christian mysticism. In the published volume, he deals with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, attempting to place the spiritual experiences of mystic writers within a historical framework. In the introduction, de Certeau declines to identify himself as a mystic. Instead, he voices a desire to understand the mystics of the past, even though he admits the project is probably doomed to failure. This attitude exemplifies de Certeau's view of all attempts to write history: It is impossible, yet it must be done.

He died in 1986, and that same year a collection of his essays titled Heterologies came out in English. The collection delves into some of the facets of de Certeau's work that had previously gotten little notice in the English-speaking world. It contains some of de Certeau's writing on psychoanalysis (he closely associated himself with Jacques Lacan) as well as his literary criticism (he writes admiringly of Jules Verne and Alexandre Dumas). Lest we forget he was interested in political activism, the collection concludes with an essay in defense of indigenous peoples. The term "heterology" quickly became attached to de Certeau, in spite of the fact he himself does comparatively little theorizing on the term.

Still, it is a word that seems appropriate for a writer so rich and diverse. Passionate priest and secular academic, believer and skeptic, theorist and critic of theory, de Certeau not only embodied contradictions, he relished in them. Unwilling to settle down into one discipline, he used history, theatre, psychoanalysis, and religion to interrogate each other. By using different disciplines to challenge one another, de Certeau sought to obtain a more complete view of the world around us.