Epic Theater Html Brecht example essay topic

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". Over the course of his career, Brecht developed the criteria for and conditions needed to create Epic Theatre.

The role of the audience can be likened to that of a group of college aged students or intellectuals. Brecht believed in the intelligence of his audience, and their capacity for critical analysis. He detested the trance-like state that an Aristotelian performance can lure the audience into. Plays that idealize life and humanity are appealing to an audience, and this makes it easy for them to identify with the hero, they reach a state of self oblivion.

The spectator becomes one with the actor, and experiences the same fantastical climax that is unattainable in real life. "However, at the end of the performance, the audience has already experienced the highest emotional climax, the memory of which is strung along by the inevitable plot resolution. The audience has no choice but to leave with the rapidly fading memory of their dramatic stimulation and return to the underwhelming reality that awaits them outside of the theatre". 'The task of epic theatre, Brecht believes, is not so much to develop actions as to represent conditions. But to "ere present'i does not here signify "ere produce'i in the sensed used by theoreticians of Naturalism. Rather, the first point at issue is to uncover those conditions.

(One could just as well say: to make them strange (Benjamin 1966, 18-9) 'The art of epic theatre consists in arousing astonishment rather than EMPATHY. ' (Benjamin 1966, 16) " 'Theatre' consists in this; in making live representations of reported or invented happenings between human beings and doing so with a view to entertainment. At any rate that is what we shall mean when we speak of theatre, whether old or new". You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman / healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that.

Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you. The more you pull away from the public, the less power you have on screen. -- Ben Kingsley He detested the 'Aristotelian' drama and its attempts to lure the spectator into a kind of trance-like state, a total identification with the hero to the point of complete self-oblivion, resulting in feelings of terror and pity and, ultimately, an emotional catharsis. He didn't want his audience to feel emotions -- he wanted them to think -- and towards this end, he determined to destroy the theatrical illusion, and, thus, that dull trance-like state he so despised. The result of Brecht's research was a technique known as ' or the 'alienation effect'.

It was designed to encourage the audience to retain their critical detachment The dramatic aesthetic is the strong centralization of the story and a momentum that draws the six poetic elements (plot, character, theme, dialog, rhythm, and spectacle) into common relationship. [2] The epic aesthetic, by contrast, "can take a pair of scissors and cut it into individual pieces, which remain fully capable of life" (p. Brecht believed that theatre should appeal not to the spectator's feelings but to his reason. While still providing entertainment, it should be strongly didactic and capable of provoking social change. In the Realistic theatre of illusion, he argued, the spectator tended to identify with the characters on stage and become emotionally involved with them rather than being stirred to think about his own life.

To encourage the audience to adopt a more critical attitude to what was happening on stage, Brecht developed his Verfremdungs-effect ('alienation effect') -- i. e., the use of anti-illusive techniques to remind the spectators that they are in a theatre watching an enactment of reality instead of reality itself. Such techniques included flooding the stage with harsh white light, regardless of where the action was taking place, and leaving the stage lamps in full view of the audience; making use of minimal props and 'indicative's celery; intentionally interrupting the action at key junctures with songs in order to drive home an important point or message; and projecting explanatory captions onto a screen or employing placards. From his actors Brecht demanded not realism and identification with the role but an objective style of playing, to become in a sense detached observers. web epic theater. html Brecht believed that 'To think, or write, or produce a play also means to transform society, to transform the state, to subject ideologies to close scrutiny. ' Having established this doctrine for himself, Brecht instigated the use of epic theatre in an attempt to break from the Aristotelian definition. Although he did not approve of the Aristotelian version, he redefined the nature of catharsis to suit his needs.

Quick to criticism the role of the audience in traditional theatre, Brecht placed particular emphasis on the eventual let down created by fantasy. web's reference to actors as 'sellers of drugs' is particularly apt imagery. The actors sell a package of fabricated grandeur to the audience, which experiences a rush of feeling leading to an emotional high. The audience has no choice but to leave with the rapidly fading memory of their dramatic stimulation and return to the underwhelming reality that awaits them outside of the that re. This is Brecht's unflattering version of Aristotle's catharsis. Brecht also wanted the audience to see the characters as part of a larger problem instead of focusing on the plight of the individual. His theory of was conceived to prevent the audience from empathizing with the characters on stage so that his goal could be achieved web this sense, our interest was to continue to have a dialogue on both how the theatre speaks and how it is created.

Thus, I was very interested in this model: a theatre company travels somewhere, talks to people and returns with what they saw and heard to create a play. At the time I also happened to run across a Brecht essay I had not read in a long time, 'The Street Scene. ' In it Brecht uses as a model the following situation: 'an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place. ' He goes on to build a theory about his 'epic theatre' based on this model. The essay gave me an idea about how to deal with this project, both in terms of its creation and its aesthetic vocabulary. web an article that was written by Brecht that was in a Book called Brecht on Theater he said, "The stage began to tell a story. The narrator was no longer missing, along with the fourth wall.

Not only did the background adopt an attitude to the events on the stage -- by big screens recalling other simultaneous events elsewhere, by projecting documents which confirmed or contradicted what the characters said, by concrete and intelligible figures to accompany abstract conversations, by figures and sentences to support mimed transactions whose sense was unclear -- but the actors too refrained from going over wholly into their role, remaining detached from the character they were playing and clearly inviting criticism of him" (Brecht). web documentary theater is limited as a factual document, its powers lie in the ability of the art form to delve into the emotions, issues or lessons behind the facts. The past decade has seen several documentary plays produced, some with startling success. Two examples indicative of the varied directions documentary theater is moving are The Laramie Project by Mois " es Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project, and Charlie Victor Romeo, created by Robert Berger, Patrick Daniels and Irving Gregory. Our Town In November of 1998, Mois " es Kaufman, artistic director of New York City's Tectonic Theater Project, accompanied by several actor / writers from the Project, went to Laramie, Wyoming, and began interviewing citizens about the October 1998 kidnapping and murder of Matthew Shepard, a University of Wyoming college student. Shepard was gay, and his murder focused national attention on sexual orientation 'hate crimes,' and on Laramie itself. Kaufman and company spent over a year traveling back and forth to Laramie, eventually conducting over 200 interviews.

They fashioned these interviews into The Laramie Project, which premiered in Denver in March of 2000, moving Off Broadway in May. They played to full houses and received excellent reviews. In 2001, Kaufman directed a film version for HBO, which will premiere at the 2002 Sundance film festival. The similarities between The Laramie Project and the work of Anna Deaver e Smith are obvious - a play culled from interviews with the people closest to a traumatic and controversial event, later performed by the interviewers in a presentational style, where the characters talk primarily to the audience. The Laramie Project uses several actors instead of one, but, like Smith, each actor takes on several roles. However, The Laramie Project is distinctive from Smith's work in an important way.

In The Laramie Project, the writer / actor /interviewers become characters in the play: their thoughts and opinions became part of the script, and in the original productions they played themselves. Critic Steve Oxman found this element both honest and off-putting. 'The material refers frequently to the cast members themselves,' he wrote in a review of a production by the original cast at the La Jolla Playhouse in California. 'The theater company acknowledges that its members can't be pure observers, that by descending on Laramie during this time of trauma they in fact became players in this story as well. ' However, Oxman found that these 'self-referential elements occasionally become a bit self-congratulatory. ' Docudrama and Social Commentary Where the actor stops and the character begins is a question that has intrigued performers throughout the history of theater.

German director / playwright Bertolt Brecht sought to shake his audiences out of complacency by clearly delineating that line. For example, he might have his actors step out of character and comment on the action, perhaps with a cynical song. In the 1920's, Brecht began to formulate his theories of 'epic theater,' sometimes called 'theater of alienation. ' 'Brecht manipulated esthetic distance to involve the spectator emotionally and then jar him out of his empathic response,' theater historian Oscar C. Brockett wrote in his textbook The Theater, an Introduction. Brockett suggested that Brecht wanted the spectator to 'actively judge and apply what he sees on the stage to conditions outside the theater. ' The Laramie Project is documentary theater that is un apologetically subjective.

By combining honesty about the artifice of the documentary process with the thoughts of participants and onlookers, the performers mine for deeper societal truths. Charlie Victor Romeo is far more objective, yet its power still lies in the combination of the real and the theatrical, a combination that allows the audience to gain insight about what happens to people trying to do their jobs under incredible stress. These plays show that while a document can only record an event, documentary theater can inspire and educate. web most British dramatists of his generation, Hare began with Brecht. And the truth is that nobody but Brecht has ever succeeded in making his 'epic theatre' do anything except empty theatres.

The 1975 play Fanshen, set in communist China, is a gruesome example of the Brechtian 'alienation effect'. Hare's early works, like those of his collaborator, Howard Brenton, reflect his admission that 'I wrote with such political urgency that I neglected the craft'. web.