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Hey there!
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I’m Mike Rugnetta and THIS is the first
episode of Crash Course Theater.
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Welcome!
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In the episodes to come we’ll have it all:
tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,
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historical-pastoral, tragical-historical,
tragical-comical-historical-pastoral-expealidocious.
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Yup, this series could go on forever.
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And let me introduce you to Dionysus, Greek
god of the theater.
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[[[Maybe Dionysus belches from offstage.]]]
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And wine.
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They can’t all be charming, genius birdmen,
I guess.
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In this series we’ll explore the history
of theater and how we can understand and analyze
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it.
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We’ll take a look at significant plays and
performances along the way, but in this episode
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we’re going to define theater and look at
some theories about how it got started.
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So, Prologue over!
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Act 1, Scene 1, BEGIN!
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INTRO
First!
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Let’s define “theater, the building”:
a theater is a place in which a play is performed.
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If you trace the word back to its Greek origins
and it literally means “the seeing place.”
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It can be big or small, indoors or outdoors,
purpose-built or just borrowed.
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Sometimes plays are performed in spaces that
aren’t really theaters at all—in a park
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or a parking lot, on a sidewalk, or in a private
home.
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Theater also refers to the performance of
plays and to the body of literature and other
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documentation that has accompanied it.
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Some plays, known as closet dramas, aren’t
even written to be performed.
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And that’s theater, too.
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So are improvised plays that don’t have
a script and plays that have a script, but
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don’t use words, like some of Samuel Beckett’s
shorts.
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A familiar definition is that theater requires
at least one actor and at least one audience
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member and that definitely covers a lot of
stuff.
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But - what’s an actor?
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What’s an audience member?
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While most plays use human actors, there are
plays performed by robots and laptops with
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voice synthesizers.
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There are plays performed by animals and by
puppets, though usually there’s a human
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helping out with those.
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I hope.
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Sooooo … Is everything theater?
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If you want a really expansive definition,
the composer John Cage said that “theater
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takes place all the time, wherever one is;
an art simply facilitates persuading one this
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is the case.”
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So…is this theater?
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Well, not for you.
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You’re watching a video recorded earlier.
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But here.
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In this room.
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I’m performing, right?
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And there’s an audience if you include Stan
and Zulaiha watching me.
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Am I doing theater?
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Want to hear my “To be or not to be,”
guys?
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Yorick?
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Aw.
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They say no every time!
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A plague on both your houses.
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What is and isn’t theater is the kind of
question that can make your head spin.
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We’ll come back to it a couple of times,
especially when we talk about political theater
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and protest theater and immersive theater,
but for now we’ll use a more narrow definition:
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theater is a deliberate performance created
by live actors and intended for a live audience,
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typically making use of scripted language.
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We may meet some exceptions along the way—lookin’
at you, robo-actors—but this’ll work for
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now.
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And, before we get too far, let’s confront
the perennial controversy: should you spell
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theatre re or er?
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And the short answer is, both of them are
fine!
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RE is more common outside of the US but for
some folks, this spelling acts as a shibboleth.
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You may have heard someone say “a theater
is a building; but the theatre is an art!”
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or “theater is a destination, but theatre
is a journey”.
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Here at Crash Course, we don’t mind either...
but have chosen to stick with er for consistency.
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There’s no origin story for theater that
everyone agrees on, but there are some theories
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we can explore.
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In the West, at least, up until the sixth
or seventh century BCE we didn’t have theater
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as we know it today, but we did have religious
ritual, which can get pretty theatrical.
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Rituals are often ways of mediating between
the human and the supernatural.
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They can serve to enact or re-enact significant
events in the human or supernatural world—births,
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marriages, deaths, harvests.
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In ritual, according to the mythology scholar
Mircea Eliade, “The time of the event that
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the ritual commemorates or reenacts is made
present.”
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So ritual represents, literally re-presents—old
stories or ideas and makes them happen now,
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which is a lot like what theater does.
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This doesn’t mean that ritual is identical
with theater.
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Ritual is sacred, and theater is usually secular
(though not always, as we’ll see!).
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Theater and ritual can draw on similar mythological
sources, but ritual typically treats those
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sources as fact and theater as fiction.
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In ritual the audience often participates;
in theatre, they usually sit politely.
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Unless there’s audience participation, which
is universally adored.
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In the late nineteenth century, a group of
classical scholars decided to search for the
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origins of theater.
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They took an anthropological approach and
saw theater as a direct evolution of religious
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ritual.
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This theory really got going with James Frazer,
whom we also discuss in the Crash Course Mythology
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episode on Theories of Myth.
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In The Golden Bough, written between 1896
and 1915, Frazer and his contemporaries, the
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Cambridge Ritualists (btw, this is obvs the
name of my new band) tried to take a “scientific
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approach” to the question of theater’s
origins.
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He looked around at so-called “primitive”
societies in Africa and Asia, societies he
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didn’t really “know much about,” and
decided that theater had emerged as a sophisticated
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refining of ritual.
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According to Frazer, here’s how it goes:
You start out worshipping some kind of god
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or practice, and that worship gets distilled
into rituals to attract the attention of that
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god or guarantee good fortune.
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Once your primitive society really gets going,
those rituals generate myths and those myths
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get transmuted ... into theater.
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Eventually you get jazz hands and sequins.
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As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan puts
it, in this view, “Art became a sort of
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civilized substitute for magical games and
rituals….
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Art like game became a mimetic echo of and
a relief from the old magic of total involvement.”
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For an example of the (sometimes questionable)
evidence that the Cambridge Ritualists drew
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on to support their idea that ritual evolved
into theater, let’s look at the Greek historian
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Herodotus, writing in the 5th century BCE,
describing a ceremony he witnessed in Egypt.
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Take the stage, Thoughtbubble:
Thought Bubble
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This ceremony occurs at sunset in a temple.
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Some priests attend to a statue of Ares, but
most of the people involved are doing something
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very different:
“The majority of them hold clubs made of
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wood and stand at the temple's entrance while
others make vows, more than a thousand men,
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all holding clubs...
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And those few left behind with the statue
pull a four-wheeled wagon carrying the shrine
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and the statue which is in the shrine, and
the others standing at the front gates do
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not let them enter.”
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If things seem tense to you… very perceptive!
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Probably the clubs that tipped you off, right?
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Herodotus says “Those who vowed to defend
the god strike those resisting [...] As I
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understand, many even die from their wounds...”
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The ritual continues all through the night.
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And, as you might if you were Herodotus, he
asks some locals why the poundings?
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They tell him: “There lived in this temple
Ares' mother, and Ares who was raised elsewhere
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came -- after having become a man -- wishing
to lay with his mother, and the servants of
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his mother, for not having seen him before,
did not look the other way when he entered,
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rather they fended him off, and he fetching
men from another city handled the servants
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roughly and went inside to his mother.
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For this reason this fight in behalf of Ares
at the festival has become a tradition, they
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say.”
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Thanks Thoughtbubble.
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So - the Ritualists look to stories like this
to illustrate their idea that worship becomes
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ritual.
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Ritual becomes myth.
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Myth becomes performance.
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Someone writes a few songs to go along with
the skull-splitting, someone else turns the
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battle into a dance, let it all simmer for
a millennia or two, and voila “West Side
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Story”!
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This ritualism theory is useful in some ways
and as we’ll see in the next episode, it
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fits very nicely with Greek drama, mostly
because the whole theory was pretty much based
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on Greek drama.
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That’s a welcome fix to how previous generations
of scholars viewed Greek drama—as something
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very pure and stately, not as something that
might have evolved from passion and magic–but
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this theory causes problems when you try to
apply the history of Greek Drama to OTHER
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dramatic traditions.
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Turns out, Frazer and his colleagues didn’t
actually know all that much about the so-called
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“primitive” societies whose theater they
wanted to study; the rich and sophisticated
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cultures the Ritualists encountered throughout
Africa and Asia were lost on the Cambridge
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types ... because Euro-centrism.
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So they did a lot of pretty non-scientific
guessing, working backward from what they
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knew about classical theater and hypothesizing
about what kind of rituals may have produced
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it.
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Frazer also operates with the underlying belief
that all societies basically evolve in the
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same way and that even though, in his view,
so-called primitive societies are inherently
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inferior, given enough time and care they’ll
get more and more sophisticated until they
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too can produce “Cats.”
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Okay, Frazer didn’t talk a lot about Broadway
musicals, but maybe you’re starting to understand
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a couple of the major problems with this theory
and the assumption that all societies are
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on a trajectory toward Western civilization,
which in this view is getting better and better
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all the time.
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(This view, by the way, is known as “positivism”).
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Another theory that gets going after Frazer
is the idea that people create myths out of
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a desire to explain and rationalize the world
around them.
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In ritualism, myths and theater emerge as
a response to pre-existing rituals.
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But in this other theory, known as functionalism,
myths serve an etiological function, a way
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of explaining how and why things came to be
the way they are.
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According to one of the leading functionalist
theorists, Bronislaw Malinowski, myth “is
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a statement of primeval reality which lives
in the institutions and pursuits of a community.
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It justifies by precedent the existing order.”
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Unlike the ritualists, the functionalists
didn’t assume that all societies operate
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and evolve in the same way or will create
the same kinds of myths.
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Malinowski didn’t really discuss theater,
but some of his followers did, and they locked
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on to the idea that many early Greek dramas
have their origins in myth and some of those
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myths are etiological.
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The “Oresteia,” explains the legal system,
“Prometheus Bound,” explains that liver
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is tasty.
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JK.
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It explains how we get fire... and technology.
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So, if myths explain the world, and theatre
is based in myth, we can think about theater
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as a way of explaining the world to ourselves.
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But such a view has some drawbacks.
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Take one of the very earliest recorded plays,
Aeschylus’s “The Persians.
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That was based in contemporaneous historical
events, not in myth.
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Besides the ritualists and the functionalists,
there are a few other theories, too.
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One is that theater derives at least in part
from the clown figure – who is sort of the
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secular equivalent of the shaman in early
societies.
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Their job was to make fun of the headman and
other establishment figures and practices.
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We can maybe see this influence in satyr plays,
which we’ll visit in the next episode.
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And it’s linked, at least a little, to the
idea that theater may originate from games
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and the playful instincts of humankind, a
phenomenon called the ludic impulse.
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Another related theory, which really gets
going with Aristotle, is that human beings
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have a “mimetic impulse”: humans have
an in-built desire to imitate, to act, to
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pretend--and that’s how we learn.
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According to Aristotle, this desire eventually
gets refined and codified into theater.
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To sum up: Ritual, myth, clowning, playing
games, playing pretend.
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Somehow out of all of this or maybe out of
none of it we get “Hamilton.”
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And now let’s turn to our last question
for today: Why should we care?
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In other words, why does theater matter?
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Well, that’s a question we’ll be coming
back to throughout the series as we see how
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and why people make theatre, and the impact
it has throughout history.
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But let me leave you with one idea borrowed
from Percy from Percy Bysshe Shelley: “The
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highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest
species of the drama, is the teaching the
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human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies,
the knowledge of itself.”
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Thanks for watching and ... curtain!
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