Top Shows of 2025

Anyone who remembers the New York theatre scene from before the dreaded covid shutdown knows that this city has yet to fully recover. Theatre today is simply less ambitious, less imaginative, and less interesting than it was before 2020.

Still, there are some exceptions. Last year, there were a few remarkable shows that made my annual top-ten list, including Broadway's re-imagining of The Great Gatsby and a new production of the Giuseppi Verdi classic La Forza del Destino at the Metropolitan Opera.

This year, I have a new list of the best shows I saw in New York City that opened since January 1st. That doesn't include some of the excellent productions I saw outside of New York, including Sunday in the Park with George in Pittsburgh or Dear Liar in Niagara-on-the-Lake, not to mention my own workshop of After an Earlier Incident at Theatre of Western Springs.

10. Nongod - This trio of one-act plays by Leon Lone was a pleasant surprise. Seeing ancient deities from Egypt, Russia, and Mexico come to life on stage turned out to be both funny and emotionally engaging.

9. The Wild Duck - Ibsen classics other than A Doll House or Hedda Gabler are few and far between in the U.S., so I was delighted that Theatre for a New Audience announced they would reviving The Wild Duck. Maaike Laanstra-Corn gave a striking portrayal of Hedwig.

8. The Lady From the Sea - What was I saying about Ibsen classics? Even better was Susane Lee's adaptation of The Lady From the Sea, performed appropriately right on the Hudson River. Lee reset the play in Canada, but kept its spirit, and the outdoor venue was delightful.

7. Pygmalion - Gingold Theatrical Group always does a good job with their shows, and this year's production of Bernard Shaw's most famous comedy was no exception. Synnøve Karlsen, now famous as young Cassie from television's Miss Austen, made her New York debut as the irrepressible Eliza Doolittle.

6. Kowalski - Gregg Ostrin's play about an imagined meeting between Tennessee Williams and Marlon Brando was a hit Off-Broadway at The Duke on 42nd Street. There have been plans to move it to Broadway. If that happens, you'll want to see it. In addition to probing into the creation of the American classic A Streetcar Named Desire, it's a great vehicle for two fine actors.

5. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - While it's true that the second act wasn't as good as the first, this new opera based on the Michael Chabon novel of the same name still wowed audiences, in part due to sets and projections by 59 Studio. Fortunately, it's coming back this spring, so if you missed it in the fall, you can still catch it at the Met beginning February 17.

4. Wine in the Wilderness - Classic Stage Company had been planning this revival of the classic Alice Childress drama for quite some time. With direction by LaChanze, it hit all the right notes. The set designed by Arnulfo Maldonado wrapped the audience around the action, making the riot outside feel shockingly close, and Grantham Coleman once again gave an amazing performance.

3. The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse - Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley's new musical perfectly channels pop music from earlier in the century while telling a story of the Internet stardom (and helldom) of today. The New Group deserves kudos for bringing it to Off-Broadway audiences, and for featuring some incredibly gifted young performers, including Patrick Nathan Falk, Keri René Fuller, Luke Islam, and Milly Shapiro.

2. Dead Outlaw - An even better new musical that premiered this year on Broadway (transferring from an Off-Broadway run last year) was Dead Outlaw, which tells the fascinating real-life story of Elmer McCurdy, who literally couldn't pull off a crime to save his life. Itamar Moses, David Yazbek, and Erik Della Penna were able to hilariously tell the tale while at the same time evoking scenes of sheer pathos. Like Yazbek's Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, this show deserves a long afterlife with regional and community theatres.

1. Moby-Dick - The best show I saw this year, though, has to be Jake Heggie's opera Moby-Dick, which made its Met premiere earlier this year. Though the piece first premiered at the Dallas Opera 15 years ago, this was the first time New York audiences were able to see and hear it live. Having written my own stage adaptation of the Herman Melville novel, I have lots of opinions on how to best stage the story, but the union of sets and projections seemed flawless in this staging, and the music is some of Heggie's best. The tenor Brandon Jovanovich also made a profound Captain Ahab.

That's the list. I know! Two operas and only a single work from the Broadway stage, and that one which premiered Off-Broadway first. The dynamics of New York theatre are certainly changing.

Henry Arthur Jones

The British dramatist Henry Arthur Jones has fallen out of fashion now, but he was once extraordinarily popular.

I've previously written about The Silver King, a melodrama Jones co-wrote with Henry Herman that opened at the Princess's Theatre in 1882, starring Wilson Barrett as a reformed drunkard who makes his fortune in a Nevada silver mine.

Two years later, Jones collaborated again with Herman in a bizarre reworking of Henrk Ibsen's A Doll House called Breaking the Butterfly. The play sought to give the drama a happy ending, in which the husband offers to ruin himself for his wife before the difficulties are resolved without sacrifice.

That's not what happens in Jones's 1894 play The Masqueraders, though. The play famously staged a card game in which one man won the wife and child of another. He then whisks his new "wife" off to the Alps, thinking to raise a family abroad with the woman he loves. Ultimately, though, the woman's sister convinces him that this plan would render her impure in the eyes of her child. Instead he undertakes a journey to Africa in which he will most likely perish.

Africa seems to have been a convenient place for Jones to send men off to once their romantic lives grew too complicated. He did the same thing at the end of his 1897 play The Liars. In that play, Edward Falkner is in love with a married woman, Lady Jessica Nepean. Her domineering husband Gilbert nearly drives her into Falkner's arms, but in the final act, the comical Sir Christopher Deering whisks Falkner off to Africa to mediate with some warring chieftains, leaving Lady Jessica to return to her husband.

However, The Liars should not be confused with Jones's later play The Lie, which was made into a (now lost) silent film. Perhaps when you write as many plays as he did, you have to start cycling back through title ideas.

The Silver King

Henry Arthur Jones is famous for championing a new, more serious form of drama for the London stage, but early in his career he wrote a good old-fashioned English melodrama called The Silver King.

Jones collaborated on the play with Henry Herman. The actor-manager Wilson Barrett directed the piece and took on the leading role of Wilfred Denver when the play first opened at the Princess's Theatre in 1882.

The first act shows Denver as a drunkard and a gambler, arguing angrily with Geoffrey Ware, who formerly wooed Denver's wife Nelly. A group of robbers infiltrate Ware's apartment, and when the drunken Denver arrives, they frame him for Ware's murder.

One of the interesting aspects of the play is that Denver actually thinks himself guilty. When he arrives at Ware's apartment, angry and looking for a fight, he is assaulted by the thieves, who knock him out with chloroform. When Denver wakes up, he sees his fired revolver and the dead body of Ware. The logical conclusion that he draws is that he killed Ware.

In the second act, Denver tries to escape London by train, though some of the passengers seem suspicious of him. He leaps from the train, injuring his foot in the process, but the dangerous jump turns out to be a good move. The train, we later hear, was subsequently involved in a fiery accident. The murder suspect Denver was reported to be on board and is presumed to have died and burned up in the crash.

This turn of events, with Denver ending the second act pledging to be a new man, was the idea of Jones's collaborator, Herman, who appears to have not written much else of the play. Barrett also claimed to have written some of the piece, but most of the play was the brainchild of Jones, including the scenes of a cruel landlord attempting to evict Nelly and her children in the play's third act.

Jones went on to write an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House called Breaking a Butterfly, again with Herman as a collaborator. Later plays by Jones included Saints and Sinners, Judah, The Crusaders, and The Masqueraders.

The Silver King, which takes its name from the fact that the reformed Denver later makes a fortune in a Nevada silver mine, went on to be filmed multiple times. Its exciting and sensationalistic plot was perfect for the movies.

Postmodernism

Just as the failed revolutions of 1848 brought about the climax and end of Romantic movements across Europe, the year 1968 brought a climax of the dreams and ambitions of the entire world in the post-war era, as well as the collapse of those dreams for very many.

In January of that year, the Prague Spring began in Czechoslovakia, when the liberal reformer Alexander Dubček became head of the country's Communist Party, promising "Socialism with a human face" and lifting censorship. The wave of liberalization led to uprisings in Poland and other Eastern European countries, as more and more people sought liberation from the oppressive policies of the past.

In the United States, Robert Kennedy launched a campaign for president that drew millions of young, idealistic voters. Meanwhile, his ally Martin Luther King Jr. was leading a civil rights movement that continued to be peaceful, in spite of provocations by white supremacists.

But if the year promised freedom, what it ultimately delivered was death. The bloody Tet Offensive in Vietnam left a huge number of casualties. Both King and Kennedy were assassinated. Student protests in Paris devolved into riots that failed to bring about meaningful political change. Across the United States, many cities were literally burning with social strife, and authorities tried only to contain the violence, unable (and in the view of many observers, unwilling) to stop it.

The Prague Spring collapsed, and days later, so did the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, as police clashed with anti-war protestors. The subsequent election of Richard Nixon as President of the United States and installment of Soviet tanks throughout Eastern Europe ensured that violence, repression, and decay would continue.

Though the following year, 1969, saw the first human beings land on the moon, what should have been a victory for all humanity came in the wake of so much chaos that many people were unsure of what humanity's future would really be. Modernism, which had thrived after World War II, seemed hopelessly naïve with its optimism of unending horizons and positive change.

Instead, art from around 1970 on is sometimes labelled postmodern, since it embraces skepticism and irony rather than grand gestures and sweeping narratives. Postmodern art engages with art from the past, but in a way that is eclectic, borrowing snatches and pieces of past art, but deliberately not synthesizing it together into a unified, comprehensive whole. The very notion of totality or universalism becomes a bitter joke in the hands of postmodern artists.

Postmodernism can be seen in architecture, for instance the AT&T skyscraper in New York which is topped by a non-functional broken pediment. It can be seen in photography, for instance in the work of Cindy Sherman, whose "Untitled Film Stills" series shows the photographer herself dressed up in various costumes, looking like she is in a series fictional movies. Postmodern sculptors like Jeff Koons use grand techniques to immortalize items of kitsch, producing such objects as giant stainless steel balloon animals. 

Perhaps the defining element of postmodernism is its unwillingness (and perhaps inability) to get away from the past it always confronts. The postmodern feminist artist Judy Chicago spent years assembling "The Dinner Party" which includes 39 place settings at a giant triangular table, each place setting painstakingly handcrafted to honor a different woman from history, including the playwrights Hrotsvitha, Hildegard of Bingen, and Virginia Woolf.

In theatre, postmodernism can be seen in the work of such playwrights as Tom Stoppard, Heiner Müller, and Janusz Glowacki, each of whom wrote plays that deconstruct the most famous work in the dramatic canon: William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1966, shifting the play's center of attention from Hamlet to two minor characters. The play's dialogue is deeply influenced by the work of Samuel Beckett, but its playfulness marks it as a work of postmodern drama rather than the serious modernism practiced by Beckett. Müller's 1977 play Hamletmachine goes even further in its rejection of the conventions of drama, questioning even the importance of an author at all. In 1982, Glowacki premiered Fortinbras Gets Drunk, which takes a Stoppard-like approach of focusing on a minor character from Hamlet, but to probe political issues as much as existential ones. All three writers went on to create other postmodern works, including Stoppard's Travesties, which reworks Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, Müller's Quartet based on the Pierre Choderlos de Laclos novel Dangerous Liaisons, and Glowacki's The Fourth Sister, which sends up Chekhov.

The British writer Harold Pinter was a close associate of Beckett, and his early works, The Birthday Party, The Caretaker, and The Homecoming, all exhibit the anxieties of post-war theatre of the absurd. Dubbed "comedies of menace," these plays rely on seemingly mundane dialogue and pregnant pauses to create an atmosphere of dread that reflected the unspoken horror of the new nuclear age. In the 1970s, though, Pinter turned in a new direction. Influenced by the postmodern turn toward skepticism and questioning, Pinter wrote a series of plays that retained the sometimes comic and sometimes tragic atmosphere of his earlier plays, but that delved into the nature of memory of past events. In Old Times, three people tell stories about their past together, sometimes revising their versions of the story, and sometimes contradicting the versions of other characters. Pinter's 1975 play No Man's Land depicts two older men recalling their past lives together, but the piece gets us to not only question whether the two men ever met in the past, but also whether the men themselves know the truth. One of Pinter's most commercially successful works, Betrayal, tells the story of a marital affair, but in reverse chronological order, from end to beginning.

Another postmodern British playwright, Caryl Churchill, first rose to prominence with Cloud 9, an attack on Victorian colonialism and sexual repression that implies a link between the two. Her 1982 play Top Girls utilized overlapping dialogue and out-of-chronology scenes to critique the way women sacrifice themselves and one another to get ahead in the world. Written in the wake of the election of the rightwing politician Margaret Thatcher as the first female prime minister of the United Kingdom, the play celebrates feminism while at the same time critiquing it. Churchill's work sometimes appropriates figures from folk belief to discuss contemporary issues, as is the case in Mad Forest and The Skriker, but the hallmark of her plays is an unending drive to experiment. Her fragmented 2012 play Love and Information contains more than 100 characters in dozens of scenes, many of them less than a minute long.

One manifestation of postmodernism in drama has been the so-called Theatre of Images. While most traditional theatre has been concerned with language (one of the six elements of drama laid out by Aristotle), the Theatre of Images replaces linguistic texts with a procession of images that are not necessarily aligned with any verbal meaning. Directors such as Richard Foreman, Lee Breuer, and Robert Wilson are often identified as artists working in a Theatre of Images rather than a theatre of words. Foreman is influenced by modernist writers like Gertrude Stein, but he has also tried to make audience members active participants in the creation of theatre, as he did with his 1976 play Rhoda in Potatoland. He frequently directs plays with non-professional actors, preferring their simplistic expressions over the mannered performances of trained actors.

Breuer co-founded the avant-garde Mabou Mines Theater Company in 1970 (together with JoAnne Akalaitis, Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, Frederick Neumann, and David Warrilow). With Mabou Mines, he has re-imagined numerous classic plays from the canon. His production of Gospel at Colonus used gospel music to re-introduce the feeling of the sacred into Sophocles' play Oedipus at Colonus. Breuer's production of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll House portrayed Nora as physically towering over the men in the play, accentuating the absurdity of her situation. His production of Peter and Wendy used Japanese-style puppetry techniques to tell the story of Peter Pan, and has played to adult and child audiences alike.

The term Theatre of Images is perhaps most associated with Wilson, who borrows from different media, cultures, and historical time periods to create eclectic pieces of theatre that usually have no discernible plot. He collaborated with the composer Philip Glass to create the 1976 opera Einstein on the Beach. Because of the length of the opera (more than five hours with no intermission) audience members were invited to come and go as they pleased, selecting which parts they chose to pay attention to and which parts to ignore. For the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Wilson planned a massive 12-hour-long performance called the CIVIL warS: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, but the Olympic Arts Festival cancelled it. Since then, Wilson has frequently worked outside of the United States.

Some scholars have labeled the Theatre of Images as postdramatic, since it eschews plot in favor of creating an overall mood or feeling. Rather than creating a narrative that tells a story, postdramatic theatre focuses on physical phenomena that audiences experience directly. While this style of theatre has its roots with modernist playwrights like Beckett, as well as postmodern writers like Müller, Pinter, and Churchill, it attempts to outgrow the playwright entirely. It renders the text as merely one component of a performance, and usually not even a very important one. Postdramatic performance stretches theatre to its limits, and because of that, most audiences have tended to avoid it, opting instead for more commercial theatrical ventures.

Day One of ATHE

Today, I planned to go to an orientation session at the annual conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education. Unfortunately, the session got moved to an earlier time slot, which I found disorienting.

Perhaps it was all for the best, because instead I went to a discussion on publishing an article in an academic journal. Jennifer Parker-Starbuck was there from Theatre Journal, along with Lisa Brenner from Theatre Topics, and R. Darren Gobert from Modern Drama.

Prof. Gobert mentioned that he keeps a close eye on the number of downloads articles in Modern Drama get. He said an insightful article on A Raisin in the Sun will always get lots of hits. I asked him what other plays generate the most traffic, and he said The Importance of Being Earnest, A Doll House, and Hedda Gabler.

Later I went to a session called "Playwrights, Revelation, and Revolution." Leigh Kennicott spoke about August Wilson and John O'Connor delivered a paper on Howard Brenton. Howard Einsohn, who I met briefly at the Shaw in New York Conference a few years ago, talked about Androcles and the Lion, a play I rather enjoyed when I saw it last summer in Niagara-on-the-Lake.

The last speaker in the session was Elaine Molinaro, who showed pictures of the production of Paul Claudel's The Tidings Brought to Mary that she directed for Culture Connection Theater. It looked great. I wish I could have seen it!

Tomorrow, I present my paper on Lord Byron. Looking forward to it!

The Other Norwegian Playwright

It's a joke, right? How many Norwegian playwrights do you know? There's only one. Ibsen. That's it.

Except of course that it isn't. Even during Ibsen's lifetime, he wasn't the only Norwegian dramatist of note. He still had to compete with Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson.

Norway's National Theater in Oslo has three names carved across its front facade: Ibsen, Holberg, and Bjørnson. Ibsen we all know. He was the great pioneer of Realism, author of such plays as A Doll House and The Lady From the Sea.

Ludvig Holberg came a bit earlier. He was one of the pioneering writers of the Age of Reason in the eighteenth century. Holberg, whose comedies include Jeppe of the Hill, The Lying-In-Room, and The Beautiful Bridegroom, was born in Bergen, which is now in Norway, but at the time was a part of a joint Dano-Norwegian kingdom. He spent much of his career in Copenhagen, though, and is claimed by both Norwegians and Danes as their own.

Though both Ibsen and Bjørnson wrote in a dialect of Dano-Norwegian that isn't really spoken anymore, they also both lived to see Norway become an independent country again in 1905, with its own king and parliament--and its own National Theater. The National Theater was actually founded in 1899, before Norway gained full independence. Its first director was Bjørnson's son, Bjørn Bjørnson, who gave the theater three opening nights, one for Holberg, one for Ibsen, and one for his father.

Ibsen and the elder Bjørnson started out on good terms. Ibsen published his controversial verse drama Love's Comedy in 1862, gaining quite a bit of notoriety, and three years later Bjørnson became director of a theater in Christiana (now Oslo), and produced his own play The Newly-Married Couple. Both men were growing artistically, but it was Bjørnson who was enjoying considerably more success. Love's Comedy and The Newly-Married Couple both dramatize the conflicts between romantic ideals and the reality of everyday relationships. While Love's Comedy ends unhappily with the main couple torn apart, The Newly-Married Couple has a cheerful if conventional ending. Perhaps that's why Bjørnson was more popular.

The first act of The Newly-Married Couple shows Axel, a young man recently married to Laura and now living with Laura's wealthy parents. When the two are invited to a ball being held in their honor, Laura declines to go, because her mother has a cough and she cannot fathom attending a ball without her dear mother. Axel is amazed that his young wife is more attached to her parents than she is to him. He progressively tries to assert himself, suggesting he and Laura move out on their own so he can get a job with his uncle's law firm and make a name for himself. All this is foolishness to Laura and her parents, but eventually her father relents, sadly admitting that it is only natural for a daughter to forsake her parents and cling to her husband.

As the second act opens, the audience sees Axel and Laura's sitting room, which is arranged almost identically to the sitting room of her parents in the first act. Axel has had to arrange everything exactly as it was before just to keep Laura mollified, and has even hung two large portraits of her parents in the room. In spite of her husband's efforts, Laura is still homesick, and when her friend Mathilde introduces her to a sentimental novel with a plot suspiciously like her own situation, she becomes even more miserable. A surprise visit by Laura's parents looks like it can only lead to disaster, but the parents mistakenly observe how the couple have made each other profoundly happy. The two young people have their eyes opened to how much the other has sacrificed for love, and all ends happily.

When the play opened in 1865, Ibsen and Bjørnson respected each other as comrades both fighting to elevate the literature of their native language. True, Bjørnson was enjoying considerably more success, but Ibsen does not seem to have held that against him. Two years later, Ibsen's play Brand was being performed in Stockholm, and he was publishing his masterpiece, Peer Gynt. Bjørnson loved Peer Gynt, giving the poetic drama high praise, but in 1869 Ibsen published his satyrical play The League of Youth, and Bjørnson believed that he himself was being made fun of in character of the protagonist, Stensgaard. Ibsen denied this, and even wrote a letter to Bjørnson to patch up their friendship, but the damage was done.

The two became reconciled years later due to another play, Ibsen's Ghosts. Critics mercilessly attacked the play, but Bjørnson saw its merits and vigorously came to Ibsen's defense. A couple years after the publication of Ghosts, Bjørnson wrote his controversial play A Gauntlet. By that point, Bjørnson had drawn the ire of so many people in Scandinavia that he had difficulty getting the play produced. It was first performed in Hamburg, Germany, in an altered version Bjørnson hated. Both playwrights were now having to deal with a hostile public.

Ibsen and Bjørnson had another reason to reconcile as well. In 1892, Ibsen's son Sigurd married Bjørnson's daughter Bergliot. The two greatest Norwegian playwrights of their day eventually became a family. Incidentally, their mutual grandson Tancred Ibsen became an important Norwegian film director. Small world.

A Doll's House, Part 2

If the title of Lucas Hnath's new play A Doll's House, Part 2 sounds like a joke, that's because it is, but Hnath is determined to mine a classic playwriting exercise for all the comic gold it's worth.

Yes, I know instructors who have given the assignment: "Write an extra scene for Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House after Nora leaves." This is usually a way to get students thinking, not generally a recipe for a new Broadway show.

The Nobel Prize-winning Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek wrote a play called What Happened After Nora Left Her Husband in 1980, so Hnath's success in getting a sequel to A Doll's House produced is not unprecedented. However, when your precedent comes from a Nobel Prize winner, putting something like this on Broadway seems like a gutsy move.

Does it pay off? Well, the piece certainly earns its fair share of laughs. In the first scene, Nora (played by Laurie Metcalf) returns to the Helmer household after having made a new life for herself as a successful writer. There's something she wants, and she takes her sweet time in enlisting the help of her former governess, Anne Marie (played by Jayne Houdyshell).

It turns out that her husband Torvald (Chris Cooper) never actually filed for divorce. This surprises Nora, though personally, I always assumed Torvald wouldn't make the separation legal. That would take more spine than he's got. Watching Torvald try to avoid honestly looking his wife in the face is amusing, largely because it's so rooted in character.

The best scene, however, isn't with Anne Marie or Torvald, but comes when Nora is forced to face her adult daughter Emmy (played by Condola Rashad). Emmy is affable, energetic, playful, and extremely perceptive--everything Nora is in Ibsen's A Doll's House. Having grown up without a mother, though, she has chosen a very different path and has a completely different view of marriage and family than her mother.

After the wonderful Emmy scene, Hnath still has some twists and turns for the audience, but Nora's confrontation with her daughter is the heart of the play. While everyone is dressed in nineteenth-century clothes, the dialogue remains self-consciously modern. This sequel might not be as good as the original when performed by top actors, but it is still a great deal of fun.

If you want to go, check out the show's website. Also, $29 tickets are available through TheaterMania. Those tickets are in the back row, but when I saw the show on Tuesday night, the ushers moved us up to the front mezzanine before the play started.

Best Plays of 2016

There weren't too many good things about 2016, but there were a few stand-out theater productions in New York, so once again I'm compiling a list of the best shows I saw that opened in New York City this past year.

Remember, these are shows that opened in 2016, so I couldn't include Sense and Sensibility, The Woodsman, and some other great plays I saw this year. Here are my picks in reverse order:

10. Blackbird - David Harrower wrote Blackbird more than a decade ago, but the play didn't make its Broadway premiere until this past February. That's a sad commentary on the state of American theater, but better to arrive late than never. Jeff Daniels and Michelle Williams were excellent in this two-hander (or is it?) and the play kept audiences guessing right until the end.

9. Othello: The Remix - This hip-hop update of Shakespeare's tragedy re-imagines the story with a comic twist, but the Q Brothers manage to create a few touchingly dramatic moments as well. This show is still playing at the Westside Theater off-Broadway, and if you haven't seen it yet, get your tickets now! It's only running until January 15th, so you better act fast.

8. The Bacchae - The Faux-Real Theatre Company does some magnificent work re-imaging the Greek classics, and this year's production of The Bacchae at La Mama was no exception. The masks were excellently done, and the moments when they came on and off of the actors were especially powerful. Lynda White's puppets brought added excitement to Euripides' tragedy. Be sorry if you missed it!

7. The Humans - Stephen Karam's off-Broadway hit The Humans transferred to Broadway this year, winning a Tony Award for Best Play in the process. While the cast of The Bacchae was filled with young up-and-comers, this production features veteran actors Reed Birney and Jayne Houdyshell giving performances of a lifetime. The Humans is also closing January 15, so get your tickets if you haven't seen it yet!

6. The Place We Built - Kudos to The Flea for staging this play about a right-wing takeover in Hungary that seems scarily prescient of our own country's position today. Sarah Gancher's script gives a shocking account of recent events in Hungary told through the eyes of a young American filmmaker (played touchingly by Isabelle Pierre). The play's use of music also added tremendously to the performance. Particularly given recent events, we need more plays like this.

5. Widowers' Houses - The Actors Company Theatre is known for their quality revivals of classics, and this co-production they did with Gingold Theatrical Group earlier this year even surpassed expectations. George Bernard Shaw's first performed play doesn't get done much anymore, and this production proved what a shame that is. Widowers' Houses exposes not just the corruption of our economic system, but also how all of us are implicated. More than a hundred years after the play was written, it is still sadly relevant.

4. Puffs - Yes, this show has been around for a while, but it only opened off-Broadway this year, so I'm including it on the list. If you haven't seen it yet, Puffs tells the story of a certain boy wizard during seven increasingly eventful years at a magical school that shall not be named for copyright reasons. The brilliance of this play by Matt Cox is that instead of focusing on Harry and his friends, it gives us an account of three losers at the school who belong to the one house that perpetually comes in last. If you're a Potterhead and haven't seen it... where have you been! Get your tickets now!

3. Hadestown - New York Theatre Workshop's production of Hadestown has got to be the best new musical to come out of 2016. Based on a concept album by Anais Mitchell, the show tells the story of Orpheus and Eurydice against the background of Depression-era rural America. When Patrick Page as Hades asks the musical question "Why do we build the wall, my children?" chills will definitely run through your body. Though the brilliant production directed by Rachel Chavkin is closed, a cast album is being released, and I'm holding out hope that this show will eventually return, perhaps even on Broadway.

2. Butler - Richard Strand's comedy about the Civil War general Benjamin F. Butler has been making the rounds at regional theaters, but when New Jersey Repertory Company brought their production to 59E59, it was the first time New York City audiences got a chance to see the play. Ames Adamson was perfect as the title character in this comedy about how history-shaping decisions really get made. Strand proves that serious topics like war and slavery can be laughing matters after all. Though theater in New York City may be struggling, this production proves that in many places, regional theater is still going strong.

1. A Doll's House - My favorite production this year was Theatre for a New Audience's magnificent staging of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. Starring Maggie Lacey and John Douglas Thompson, this play could not have asked for a better cast. Director Arin Arbus placed the audience on two sides of the stage, making sure that everyone had an intimate experience with the classic play. This rendition was funny, sexy, and ultimately heartbreaking. Thorvald and Nora's marriage made sense in this version, though that didn't mean it wasn't still doomed from the beginning. Make a note to check out TFANA's shows next year. They could be just as surprising!

Honorable mentions this year go to Mabou Mine's Imagining the Imaginary Invalid and Ivo van Hove's Broadway production of The Crucible. Hopefully 2017 will be a better year, for the theater and for the world!

The Father

Currently, August Strindberg's play The Father is running in rep with Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House at Theatre for a New Audience. This is an excellent opportunity to see two companion plays (both directed by Arin Arbus) back to back with an amazing cast.

Strindberg wrote The Father in 1887, eight years after A Doll's House (or A Doll House if you prefer that translation of the title). In part, it was a reaction to a number of Ibsen's plays, including Rosmersholm, which had come out the previous year. Being that the play concerns marriage, though, parallels with A Doll's House are most apparent.

TFANA's productions play up those parallels. John Douglas Thompson, who plays Thorwald in A Doll's House, is the title character in The Father, and Maggie Lacey, a superb Nora in Ibsen's drama, plays his wife Laura in The Father. Both plays feature physicians, and Nigel Gore admirably portrays both doctors. Similarly, Laurie Kennedy appears as a nanny in the two plays.

At one point, Strindberg's father asks, "Do you know Ibsen's Ghosts?" The audience, predictably, roars with laughter. I found myself ghosting that play while watching The Father. Strindberg's pastor (played by Jesse J. Perez) reminded me of Pastor Manders in Ghosts, and the title character's hovering between life and death at the end of the play is eerily similar to Oswald at the end of Ghosts.

While A Doll's House is performed with an intermission, TFANA is presenting all three acts of The Father straight through, with only a short pause as the stage is reset between acts. Also, this adaptation by David Greig takes some liberties, including making the final moment between Laura and her daughter more ambiguous than it is in the original text.

Though I preferred A Doll's House (which, honestly, is just a better play), both pieces are worth seeing, and they benefit from viewing them back to back. If you're interested in tickets, go to:

Theatre for a New Audience

A Doll's House

Last night I saw Theatre for a New Audience's stellar production of A Doll's House. This could easily be the best production of the classic play that New York audiences will have a chance to see in their lifetimes, so go now!

What's so great about it? Let's start with the cast. Nora is played by Maggie Lacey with buoyant energy and impeccable comic timing. Comedy? In Ibsen? YES! Those who know Norwegian have told me that Henrik Ibsen's plays are packed with humor, and Et dukkehjem (perhaps more accurately translated as A Doll House) is no exception. TFANA uses Thornton Wilder's adaptation, which deftly picks up on the comedy, giving Lacey plenty of opportunities to shine.

John Douglas Thompson, who memorably played Tamburlaine the Great at TFANA two years ago, is the most interesting Thorwald I've ever seen. Though Thompson is a bit older than I generally picture the character, his age added to the role. We immediately get the sense that this is a man at the peak of his career, more than ready to take over as president of the local bank. The fact that he is older than his wife does not excuse his behavior, but it does make his patronizing attitude toward her appear as something we might see today and not just a relic of the nineteenth century.

And what do you get when you put Lacey and Thompson on stage together? Not just funny Ibsen, but hot, sexy Ibsen! These two have incredible chemistry on stage. With the intense physical attraction they show for one another, we have no questions about why this seemingly mismatched pair married each other. The fact that both actors look fabulous in their costumes designed by Susan Hilferty doesn't hurt, either.

The entire cast is excellent, but Nigel Gore stands out as Doctor Rank, imbuing the character with a flippant gallows humor. Linda Powell and Jesse J. Perez are wonderful as Christina Linden and Nils Krogstad, and watching these two old flames reignite in the third act is a joy. This production also keeps the two children (played by the adorable Ruben Almash and Jayla Lavender Nicholas), who return to the stage for one last poignant tableau at the end of the play.

Director Arin Arbus has staged the play with the audience on two sides of the stage. This keeps the action intimate, no matter where you are in the audience, and prevents the characters from being crowded out by the excessive detail of a typical box set. During the final scene, the lights indicate a dawning new day, and at the same time, the audience becomes more more visible to one another. Gazing across the stage, we are confronted with our 21st-century counterparts on the other side.

It's time to stop acting out or childish fantasies and to see ourselves as we really are, Nora says as the end of the play. In those last moments, the play asks us to consider how much of our own lives are just acts and whether or not we a truly living, as we tell ourselves we are. If we accept the play's challenge and reflect upon our own self-imposed delusions, we might find that the nineteenth century isn't that far off after all.

A Doll's House is playing in repertory with August Strindberg's The Father. I'll be seeing that tonight. If you're interested in seeing them, check out:

Theatre for a New Audience

Ibsen in New York

I've been reading Ibsen (as playwrights are wont to do) and I happened to come across some e-mails announcing that the Museum of the City of New York had recently digitized and made available some 15,000 images of theatrical productions. So what did I search for? Ibsen, of course.

Here's a photo of Minnie Maddern Fiske's production of A Doll House presented at the Manhattan Theatre. The production featured Fiske as Nora and Claus Bogel as Dr. Rank.

And here's a photo of a 1903 production of Ghosts starring Mary Shaw as Mrs. Alving. Frederick Lewis played Oswald.

Here is Minnie Fiske again, this time as the title role in Hedda Gabler. The play was performed at the Manhattan Theatre in 1904.

To do your own search of the museum's archives, take a look at their website here:

Museum of the City of New York

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 Naturalism of Zola

The French novelist and playwright Emile Zola was probably the greatest proponent of Naturalism in the nineteenth century. In 1873, he adapted his novel Therese Raquin for the stage, beating Ibsen's A Doll House into theatres by a good six years. In the preface to the second edition of the novel (issued in 1868, following the book's debut the previous year), Zola explained what he was trying to do in the piece:

In Therese Raquin, I wanted to study temperaments and not characters. This is the entire book. I chose some personages supremely dominated by their nerves and their blood, lacking free will, carried away in each act of their lives by the destinies of their flesh. Therese and Laurent are crude people, in the extreme. I have sought to follow step by step in this brutal work... the pressures of instinct, the cerebral derangement that occurs as the consequence of a nervous crisis. The loves of my two heroes are the satisfaction of a need; the murder which they commit is a consequence of their adultery, [a] consequence which they accept as the wolves accept the slaughter of sheep; finally, that which I have been obliged to call remorse consists of a simple organic disorder, of a rebellion of the nervous system stretched to the breaking point. The soul is perfectly absent, I easily admit, since I had wanted it this way.

It is interesting that Zola does not claim here that there is no such thing as a soul. Rather, he says he wanted to tell a story in which the soul does not exist. The endeavor of Naturalism rests upon certain assumptions about science. Whether those assumptions were right or wrong, a Naturalist writer was bound to follow them through to their logical conclusions. Zola's preface continues:

When my two personages, Therese and Laurent, had been created, I was determined to pose and to resolve certain problems; in this way, I was tempted to explain the strange union that could grow between two different temperaments, I had watched the profound troubles of a fiery nature in contact with a nervous nature.

This vision of the artist as a detached observer, simply performing an experiment and watching to see what happens, became a hallmark of Naturalism. It's important to note that Zola did not necessarily feel this was always necessary. However, to him, it was necessary for the moment. The world had become scientific, and it only seemed (pardon the pun) natural to him that literature should become scientific, too.

The critic Denis Bablet noted that Zola saw Naturalism as the future, as part of a long evolution that might never reach an end. In a discussion of Naturalist dramaturgy, Bablet wrote:

To those who claim to define the essence of theatre, and who believe in the continuity of its conventions, Zola responds that each epoch, each society, each generation has its theatre, which must correspond to its own needs. All his affirmations rest on an evolutionary conception of literature and of art. There is no eternal literature; there is no eternal theatre.

Modern theatre has largely abandoned Naturalism, but perhaps that would not have surprised Zola at all. In fact, the very fact that we have abandoned it might be an indication that Zola was right all along.