Teaching through story telling, and later on stage, was - and indeed still is although perhaps less so now - the most effective passage to the education of the masses, regardless of race, religion, age or class distinction, drama is more than mere mindless entertainment; it's the guidelines to an entire world of philosophical ideologies and political insights meant to shape society and help it along the path to... enlightenment? Playwrights, however, need not necessarily follow the current sways of politics or the en vogue intellectuals, they write what they believe is the most valuable message to mankind; theirs is the role of observing, criticising and evaluating. A common theme visited by playwrights in modern drama, was the question of the relationship between the individual, and the society in which he lived. The Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, who wrote in the last half of the 19th Century, broached the subject from a rather feminist angle, stipulating that it was wrong to view an individual woman as a nonentity without rights outside the role of motherhood or marriage; In the 1930's and 40's, German-born writer Bertolt Brecht, produced a series of plays following ideologies common of Nihilist and later Marxist values; Following the second world war, Arthur Miller wrote to American audiences that individuals and their society are equally damning forces on one another. By following Ibsen, Brecht and Miller, three authors from three different countries, backgrounds and time frames, it is possible to witness the changing relationship between individuals and society in modern drama.
Drama in its most influential and essential state, started with the classical Greeks, who used the ritual and social functions of the sta...
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...Companion to Ibsen Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1994)
- Ewen, Freidrich Bertolt Brecht: His Life, His Art and His Times Calder and Boyers Ltd., London (1970)
- Eagleton, Terry Marxism and Literary Criticism Methuen, London (1976)
- Murphy "The tradition of social drama: Miller and his forebears" in Bigsby, Christopher, W. E. (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1997)
- Martin, Robert (ed) The theatre essays of Arthur Miller Methuen Publishing Ltd., London (1994)
- Spindler, Michael American Literature and Social Change Macmillan Press Ltd., Hong Kong (1983)
- Bennet, Susan Theatre Audiences (2nd ed) Routledge, London (1997)
- Boal, Augusto Theatre of the Oppressed Pluto Press, London (2000)
Arthur Miller’s success first began with his Broadway play, All My Sons, in 1947. This award winning play “Struck a note that was to become familiar in Miller’s work: the need for moral responsibility in families and society”. (Anderson 1212) Later, his production Death of a Salesman left him the group of America’s top playwrights....
Miller, Arthur. Why I Wrote The Crucible. New York: The New Yorker, 21 Oct. 1996. Print.
Arthur Miller, one of America's greatest playwrights, living or dead, is a master of verbal irony. An examination of three strong examples of verbal irony in Millers play, The Crucible, will prove this out. While Miller started the genre of the tragedy of the common man, and is also know for his thoughtful and decisive plot lines, much of his fame, possibly can be attributed to his brilliant use of language generally, and his use of verbal irony in particular.
"Different Types of Greek Drama and their importance." PBS. Public Broadcasting Station, n.d. Web. 23 Nov. 2014.
It is difficult to imagine a play which is completely successful in portraying drama as Bertolt Brecht envisioned it to be. For many years before and since Brecht proposed his theory of “Epic Theatre”, writers, directors and actors have been focused on the vitality of entertaining the audience, and creating characters with which the spectator can empathize. ‘Epic Theatre’ believes that the actor-spectator relationship should be one of distinct separation, and that the spectator should learn from the actor rather than relate to him. Two contemporary plays that have been written in the last thirty years which examine and work with Brechtian ideals are ‘Fanshen’ by David Hare, and ‘The Laramie Project’ by Moises Kaufman. The question to be examined is whether either of these two plays are entirely successful in achieving what was later called, ‘The Alienation Effect”.
...ly progressed from a way to tell stories about kings and gods to a way to tell stories about ordinary human beings. By moving our focus off of nobility, the language of plays became the language of every individual, and eventually, due to America’s “melting pot” culture, the language itself became individual. The unique language of American dramatic characters represents not only the diversity of the American people, but also the diversity of all human beings. These dramatically dissimilar differences were not typical of older plays when they were written, but now, they are what make American drama so valuable. Our acceptance and love for characters with different values than ours is representative of the love we can develop for those who are different from us. It represents the worldview that our current culture idealizes and strives to achieve: acceptance for all.
My work proposes a broader view of the theatre-film interface, one that relies on intertextuality as its interpretive method. I believe it is valuable-both pedagogically and theoretically-to ask broad questions about the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological exchanges between the history of theatre and contemporary film and television. For example, this paper will study how the "Chinese Restaurant" episode of the sitcom, Seinfeld, intertextually reworks Samuel Beckett's modernist play, Waiting for Godot. In each text, characters encounter an existential plight as they are forced to wait interminably, and thus confront their powerlessness at the hands of larger social forces. As a pedagogical matter, this connection encourages the students to see academic culture in the guise of having to read Beckett's play for my course, not as foreign and alienating, but instead as continuous with their understanding of leisure activities like watching sitcoms. As a theoretical matter, this intertextual connection allows important ideological matters to come into bold relie...
Through the use of dialogue, stage directions which enable us to envisage the scene on stage and characterisation we can see how dramatic tension is created by Miller. These aspects are to be explored for each act.
Writers may use literature as a vehicle of social criticism. In which ways does Arthur Miller criticize society?
In Euripides’ tragic play, Medea, the playwright creates an undercurrent of chaos in the play upon asserting that, “the world’s great order [is being] reversed.” (Lawall, 651, line 408). The manipulation of the spectators’ emotions, which instills in them a sentiment of drama, is relative to this undertone of disorder, as opposed to being absolute. The central thesis suggests drama in the play as relative to the method of theatrical production. The three concepts of set, costumes, and acting, are tools which accentuate the drama of the play. Respectively, these three notions represent the appearance of drama on political, social, and moral levels. This essay will compare three different productions of Euripides’ melodrama, namely, the play as presented by the Jazzart Dance Theatre¹; the Culver City (California) Public Theatre²; and finally, the original ancient Greek production of the play, as it was scripted by Euripides.
Douglas Lavanture."Fear as Governance: Arthur Miller's The Crucible as Contemporary Reflection." Steppenwolf Theatre Company. n.d. Web. 16 Dec. 2013.
Costello, Donald P. “Arthur Miller’s Circles of Responsibility: A View From a Bridgeand Beyond.” Modern Drama. 36 (1993): 443-453.
Martin Esslin, an established drama director, scholar, and critic, approaches his analysis of drama by drawing on his practical experience as a director of plays. Esslin implicitly assumes that drama is the most elite of the artistic genres when he directly declares the purpose of his book, which is to answer the question "why should those concerned with art resort to drama rather than any other form of communication?" Esslin then immediately poses another question that he seems to take as a prerequisite for the first question: "What is the underlying, basic nature of dramatic form and what is it that drama can express better than any other form of communication?"
Theatre will always survive in our changing society. It provides us with a mirror of the society within which we live, and where conflicts we experience are acted out on stage before us. It provides us with characters with which we identify with. The audience observes the emotions and actions as they happen and share the experience with the characters in real time.
Over the years, the essence of theatre has not only been to entertain, but to also allow the build up of a culture in a quickly growing uncultured generation. Regardless of the existence of so many other forms of entertainment, theatre has always established a commanding niche in most people’s hearts, and is undoubtedly the most realistic form of entertainment (Bruce 12). The acting bit of theatre performances makes things real and in their immediate contexts, allowing the audience to draw conclusions based on what they see. In a majority of cases, also, the play’s setting is such that there is description of definite subjects without which the play cannot make meaning. The above research takes into account A Number by Caryl Churchill. A great deal of issues and aspects can be learnt from the above play with diverse moral lessons, as well. It has long been proved that expression via acting is more direct than when the audience accesses literature in other means. This direct approach gives a broader meaning to a variety of issues in the play, which were not understood, say in videos. Additionally, the play A Number is full of theatrical ideologies with clear depiction and expression of every event. Theatricality and empowerment set this play different from other plays because of clarity in events’ sequence. The author also strives to express the idea of cloning in society as one main means of families’ downfall. This further comes with what literature calls the ‘fate of tragic heroes’, an indication of what is at stake when a person does things out of the ordinary to please him or herself.