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1945 - 1975 In Summary was a time of war, assassinations, revolutionary change and social reform.

1945 World War II Ended
1947-1955(91?) Cold War
1955 – 1975 Vietnam War

Social Reforms:
Civil Right Movement
Women's Liberation's 1970's

Politics:
1949 - NATO
1953 - Nuclear Arms Race
1954 Brown v. Board of Education
1955 - Rosa Parks arrested (Montgomery bus boycott)
1959 - NASA created
1960-Kennedy/Nixon debates
1960s - Space Race
1961- Berlin Wall Erected
1962 - Cuban Mission Crisis
1963- Kennedy assassinated
1964- Civil Rights Act
1965 - Voting rights
1965- Malcom X assassinated
1968 - MLK Assassinated
1969 - First Man on the Moon

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The Digital Revolution is the shift from mechanical and analogue electronic technology to digital electronics which began anywhere from the late 1950s to the late 1970s

Blessed items popular during these times: Radio Broadcasting, planes, nuclear power, rockets, Color Television, Home Computers, House Appliances, CD Players, Records, Cassette, video games! Cell Phones! THE INTERNET!

FUN FACT: Disco was coined because they used Disc's, Records, to play music at clubs with the beginning of turn tables

computer technology has been incorporated into many modern theatre buildings, and lighting can now be controlled by computers, SOUND DESIGN FINALLY.

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It was a branch of the New Theatre movement of the 1960s that aimed to heighten audience awareness of theatre by eliminating the distinction between the audience’s and the actors’ space.

constructing different audience frameworks for each production.

The sets were usually based on multilevel platforms, balconies, ramps, and scaffolds surrounding a stage that encroached on the audience’s territory.

provided a wider range of space for the actors

greater flexibility of interaction between the audience and performers

To enhance the immediacy of experience the multiple-focus theatre replaced the traditional single focus, allowing more than one scene to be staged at the same time.

All of these techniques were inherited from the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, including the use of psychophysical conditioning exercises for actors, the “collaging” of texts, and the shaping of theatre space.

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Grotowski's Poor Theatre and Paratheatrical Experiments

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Grotowski's Poor Theatre and Paratheatrical Experiments

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He called his theatre poor because it dispensed with theatrical trappings and the technological resources of ‘rich’ theatre. Grotowski made the actor’s voice and body central to the performance. Only stationary light sources were used; the only masks were the actors’ faces; costume was nondescript; vocal effects replaced instrumental music and sound ‘off’; the auditorium became an intimate space divided in varying ways to allow the utmost contact and exchange between performers and audience. Grotowski sought for something beyond drama. He worked to develop physical and emotional responses so that ‘impulse and reaction are concurrent’. He moved beyond the early influence of Stanislavsky towards a ritualized intensity. At moments of shock or terror, he argued, human beings use ‘rhythmically articulated signs’ and begin to dance and sing. ‘A sign, not a common gesture, is the elementary integer of expression for us’. Grotowski sought to explore moments of extreme pressure and moved naturally towards ‘archaic situations’ expressed in myth and often involving taboo.
"When the theatre confronts us with brutal situations where ‘the life mask cracks and falls away’ it can expose an ‘intimate layer’ which returns us to common human truths." -Jerzy Grotowski

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heightens certain details of action, scenery, & dialogue while omitting others

a realistic world, but the elements have been carefully chosen to underline thematic concerns

takes realism & then deviates from that form of theater, adding in artistic elements that are uncommon to everyday life

- music
- dance
- abstract design
- poetic dialogue
- supernatural elements
- breaking the 4th wall
* only some elements will be
used at a time; not all at
once because selective
realism must still contain
most of the core elements
in basic realism

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October 17th, 1915 - February 10th, 2005

American playwright, essayist, & figure in 20th century American-theater

most popular plays = All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), & A View from the Bridge (1955 but revised in 1956)

also wrote several screenplays & was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961)

typically in the public eye from the late 1940s-early 1960s
- awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
drama

- testified in front of the House
Un-American Activities
Committee [investigative
committee made up of the US
House of Representatives that
investigated alleged disloyalty
& subversive activities]
* testified because of his
"political leanings"

wrote his first play, No Villain, while working for the student paper @ the University of Michigan

- where he first majored in
journalism & then later on
switched to English

1947; All My Sons was a success on Broadway

- first Tony award for Best
Author & became an
established playwright

filming of The Misfits (1960)

- when Monroe & Miller first
started experiencing issues
- Monroe was taking drugs to
help her both fall asleep &
wake up
* led to Monroe arriving late
on set & barely remembering
her lines
- Monroe & Miller divorced
shortly before the film's
premiere in 1961
- Monroe OD'ed 19 months later

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March 26th, 1911 - February 25th, 1983

real name = Thomas Williams

American playwright

- considered among the 3
foremost playwrights of 20th
century American Drama,
along with Arthur Miller &
Eugene O'Neill

suddenly became famous with The Glass Menagerie (1944)

- closely reflected his own
unhappy family background
- opened up a string of
successes
* A Streetcar Named Desire
(1947)
* Cat On A Hot Tin Roof
(1955)
* Sweet Bird of Youth
(1959)

also wrote short stories, essays & a volume of memoirs

joined the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity while attending the University of Missouri but didn't fit in well with his frat brothers

- they called him shy, socially
awkward, & a loner that spent
most of his time at the
typewriter

failed a military training course in his junior year, so his father pulled him out of school to work @ the International Shoe Company factory but Williams hated the job so much that he ended up having a nervous breakdown & leaving by 24

later work attempted a new style that didn't appeal to audiences; later drug/alcohol use hindered further creative output

most acclaimed work was adapted for cinema

4 years before he died, he was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame

interesting fact...

- had a sister named Rose that
was diagnosed with
schizophrenia @ a young age
* Rose had horrible results
after a lobotomy & was
institutionalized for the rest
of her life
* once Williams was
financially stable, he had her
moved to a private
institution & gave her a
percentage interest in
several of his most
successful plays [royalties
were applied toward her
care] age 5 in Clarksdale, MS

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March 12th, 1928 - September 16th, 2016

American playwright

known for works such as:

- The Zoo Story (1958)
- The Sandbox (1959)
- Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? (1962)
- A Delicate Balance (1966)

3 plays won the Pulitzer Prize & 2 other works won the Tony Award for Best Play

works are often considered examinations of the modern condition

- his middle period comprised
plays explored psychology of
maturing, marriage, & sexual
relationships

troubled early life

- expelled from Lawrence
School in NJ
- dismissed in [less than a
year] from Valley Forge
Military Academy in Wayne,
PA
- expelled from Trinity College
in Hartford, Connecticut
* skipping classes, refusing to
attend compulsory chapel,
etc.
- left home at 18 because his
parents wanted him to
become a "corporate thug" &
didn't approve of his dreams in
becoming a writer
* adoptive parents that he
never got along with

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British Realism: Angry Young Playwrights 

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British Realism: Angry Young Playwrights 

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group of anti-establishment playwrights known collectively to deal with the dissolving British empire, class conflict, & political disillusionment

became prominent in the 1950s

leading figures: John Osborne & Kingsley Amis

- John Osborne
* wrote Look Back in Anger to
express what it felt like to
live in England during the
1950s; impatience with the
status quo, refusal to be
involved with a bankrupt
society, & an instinctive
unity with lower classes
* famous for the concept of
"kitchen sink drama" [British
cultural movement that
developed in theatre, art,
novels, film, & TV plays;
protagonists usually could
be described as Angry
Young Men
- Kingsley Amis
* wrote Lucky Jim, which
reacted against conventional
British life, though he never
stated that was the purpose

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a genre of radio & television programming, feature film, and staged theatre which features dramatized re-enactments of actual events

strives to adhere known historical facts

main events will remain the same while small background details [that people pay little to no attention to] can change for the sake of enhancing drama

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After WWII black theatre grew more progressive, radical, and militant, reflecting the ideals of black revolution and seeking to establish a mythology and symbolism apart from white culture. Councils were organized to abolish the use of racial stereotypes in theatre and to integrate black playwrights into the mainstream of American dramaturgy. Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun (1959) and other successful black plays of the 1950's portrayed the difficulty of blacks maintaining an identity in a society that degraded them.

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Civil Rights and African American Militancy: 1960 -1970

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Civil Rights and African American Militancy: 1960 -1970

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The 1960s saw the emergence of a new black theatre, angrier and more defiant than its predecessors, with Amiri Baraka (originally LeRoi Jones) as its strongest proponent. Baraka’s plays, including the award-winning Dutchman (1964), depicted whites’ exploitation of blacks. He established the Black Arts Repertory Theatre in Harlem in 1965 and inspired playwright Ed Bullins and others seeking to create a strong “black aesthetic” in American theatre.

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Amiri Baraka, original name Everett Leroy Jones. American poet and playwright who published provocative works that assiduously presented the experiences and suppressed anger of black Americans in a white-dominated society. After graduating from Howard University, Jones served in the U.S. Air Force but was dishonorably discharged after three years because he was suspected (wrongly (at that time)) of having communist affiliations. He attended graduate school at Columbia University and founded (1958) the poetry magazine, Yugen, which published the work of Beat writers . He began writing under the name LeRoi Jones in the late 1950s and produced his first major collection of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. His first significant play; Dutchman (1964), which recounted an explosive confrontation on a train between a black intellectual and a white woman who murders him, won the 1964 Obie Award for best Off-Broadway American play. Following the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Jones became increasingly focused on black nationalism. That year he left his white Jewish wife and moved to Harlem. There he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre, which staged many of his works prior to its closure in the late 1960s. In 1968 he adopted the name Amiri Baraka, and his writings became more divisive, prompting some to applaud his courage and others to deplore sentiments that could foster hate. In the mid-1970s he became a Marxist, though his goals remained similar. “I [still] see art as a weapon and a weapon of revolution,” he said. “It’s just now that I define revolution in Marxist terms.” His work from this period was seen by some as becoming increasingly homophobic and anti-Semitic. His position as poet laureate of New Jersey was abolished after he published the searing 2001 poem “Somebody Blew Up America,”. Baraka taught at Columbia, Yale University, and from 1979 until his death, at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where at the time of his death he was emeritus professor of Africana studies.

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Wrote A Raisin in the Sun which was the first drama by an African American woman to be produced on Broadway. Which she raised funds for to produce in 1958.  She attended the University of Wisconsin and then the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Roosevelt University. She also studied at the New School for Social Research in New York. A Raisin in the Sun was directed by actor Lloyd Richards, the first African American to direct a play on Broadway since 1907. She unfortunately died at the young age of 34 due to pancreatic cancer.

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Eclectic theatre essential brings material from a variety of sources. When eclectic theatre was beginning to emerge, many dramatists were rejecting many concepts of naturalism and realism. They were looking for something more modern and experimental. However, they still incorporated many elements of past styles, such as Epic Theatre, Absurdist Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed.

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The Man Himself

English producer-director of Shakespeare’s plays whose daring productions of other dramatists’ works contributed significantly to the development of the 20th century’s avant-garde stage.

Focused on the process and influenced by Meyerhold, Artaud, and Grotowski.

Fun Facts:

1. Most Noteable Production  “Lord of the Flies”

2. Extremely Decorated with Awards

3. The founder of the International Centre of Theatre Research

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International Centre of Theatre Research (1970)

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International Centre of Theatre Research (1970)

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- 3 year pilgrimage traveling specifically through Europe and Africa and other countries asking:
-"What were the common stories, the recognizable shorthand, the instant abstractions, the shared outlines of story and character with which an international group could work?"
- Need 3 things for theatre (place, audience, actor) Thats all, a performance can happen anywhere

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Peter Brook's Centre for Theatre Research

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Ted is reading an excerpt from Peter Brook on the intentions of his "International Centre for Theatre Research" at Les Bouffes du Nord in Paris, France (http://www.bouffesdunord.com/en). Filmed for the www.MichaelChekhovSchool.org in Hudson, NY.

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GROTOWSKI [ PRINCIPE CONSTANTE ] 1967 CONSTANT PRINCE

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PRINCIPE CONSTANTE GROTOWSKI 1967 Montaje de una grabación hecha en el Teatr Laboratorum de Wroclaw y una grabación sonora de Ferruccio Marotti hecha en Spoleto en 1967. CALDERÓN DE LA BARCA / SLOWACKI Don Fernando: Ryszard Cieślak Don Enrique played by Gaston Kulig / Stanisław Scierski tARUDANTE: Zygmunt Molik/ Maja Komorowska Muley.

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Arthur Miller was born in Harlem, New York, on October 17, 1915, to an immigrant family of Polish and Jewish descent. His father, Isidore, owned a successful coat manufacturing business, and his mother, Augusta, to whom he was closer, was an educator and an avid reader of novels.

The Miller family lost almost everything in the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and had to move from Manhattan to Flatbush, Brooklyn. After graduating high school, Miller worked a few odd jobs to save enough money to attend the University of Michigan. While in college, he wrote for the student paper and completed his first play, No Villain, for which he won the school's Avery Hopwood Award. He also took courses with playwright and professor Kenneth Rowe. Inspired by Rowe's approach, Miller moved back East to begin his career as a playwright.

He earned widespread praise for Death of a Salesman, which opened on Broadway in 1949 and won the Pulitzer Prize along with multiple Tonys. He received more acclaim for his award-winning follow-up, The Crucible, which reflected his unwavering refusal to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller's public life was painted in part by his rocky marriage to Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe. The playwright died in 2005 at the age of 89, leaving a body of work that continues to be re-staged internationally and adapted for the screen.

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~No Villain (1936)
~They Too Arise (1937, based on No Villain)
~Honors at Dawn (1938, based on They Too Arise)
~The Grass Still Grows (1938, based on They Too Arise)
~The Great Disobedience (1938)
~Listen My Children (1939, with Norman Rosten)
~The Golden Years (1940)
~The Man Who Had All the Luck (1940)[85]
~The Half-Bridge (1943)
~All My Sons (1947)
~Death of a Salesman (1949)
~An Enemy of the People (1950, based on Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People)
~The Crucible (1953)
~A View from the Bridge (1955)
~A Memory of Two Mondays (1955)
~After the Fall (1964)
~Incident at Vichy (1964)
~The Price (1968)
~The Reason Why (1970)
~Fame (one-act, 1970; revised for television 1978)
~The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972)
~Up from Paradise (1974)
~The Archbishop's Ceiling (1977)
~The American Clock (1980)
~Playing for Time (television play, 1980)
~Elegy for a Lady (short play, 1982, first part of Two Way Mirror)
~Some Kind of Love Story (short play, 1982, second part of Two Way Mirror)
~I Think About You a Great Deal (1986)
~Playing for Time (stage version, 1985)
~ I Can't Remember Anything (1987, collected in Danger: Memory!)
~Clara (1987, collected in Danger: Memory!)
~The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991)
~The Last Yankee (1993)
~Broken Glass (1994)
~Mr Peters' Connections (1998)
~Resurrection Blues (2002)
~Finishing the Picture (2004)

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Musical Theater is a form of theatre in which dialogue, singing, and dance are integrated to communicate character and plot
ex: Oklahoma: seamlessly brought together story, music, lyrics, and dances so that the production combined tone, mood, and intention as a unified whole.

By 1945, two important broadway composers had died: George Gershwin and Jerome Kern. But their contemporaries were still in tip top shape, and soon others would join them to create an astounding outpouring of musical theater. The songs were directly related to the plot, and not only was their a strong story line but often times there is a sub plot as well.

Musical Theater continued to be vibrant in the 1960s. Typically during this time there were two different types of musicals, one just purely for the entertainment of the audience, and the second with serious purpose.

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The off broadway movement developed in the late 1940s, as a reaction against broadway commercialism. Off broadway was dedicated to introducing new playwrights and reviving significant plays that did not initially become successful on broadway.

Off Broadway also did not follow the proscenium arch but rather experimented by popularizing intimate playhouses, and many were thrust or area stages. These off broadway stages proved the viability of alternative spaces. But then in the 1960s and 1970s, off broadway became much more commercialized than experimental. More conventional productions were staged as production costs rose.

So then in the beginning of the 1960s, there became off off broadway which is now the experimental theater like how off broadway used to be.

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The Living Theater, founded in 1946 by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, it was a particularly influential avant-garde company in the late 50s and 60s.
Initially it performed poetic dramas and plays by earlier avant-garde dramatists. The group also experimented with production styles, using masks, stylized gestures, vocalizations and theater conventions from the past.
The two productions that really established their reputation were, "The Connection" and "The Brig"., both of these productions made the audience feel like they were watching these as actual occurrences. Due to tax problems in the 1960s The Living Theater became nomadic. Thus presenting many of its ideas and productions in Europe. It also developed a noted production style where many of the works were created by improvisation.
The Living theater has gone through its fair share of personnel changes. One member even went off to organize the Open Theater. Before the Brazilian tour the company had broken up into three groups.

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-A philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts

.

Began in Paris in the 40s & 50s through works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

Faltering of religious belief & replacement of nationalism during WWII but after there was a void!

Enter Existentialism!  "existence precedes essence"

One is an individual rather than a role or stereotype "[Humans are] strangers in a meaningless universe, and assess their situation as absurd, or essentially pointless" - Albert Camus

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-Brought on by works of Certain European & American dramatists of the 1950s & early 60s who shared a pessimistic vision of humanity struggling in vain to find purpose and control their fate.

Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and anxious.

Absurdest structure -

playwrights did away with most of the logical structures of traditional theatre

language is often dislocated, full of cliches, puns, repetitions, and non sequiturs (a conclusion or statement that does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement)

Phased out during the 60s but some innovations were absorbed into mainstream theatre.

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1940's - approx 1989

Playwrights followed the theories of Albert Camus, in particular his essay The Myth of Sisyphus (Greek figure condemned to roll a heavy stone up a mountain then watch it roll to the bottom)

It's believed it arose from the doubts & fears surrounding WWII

Characteristics:

Hyman condition is meaningless, absurd, & illogical.

"the inevitable devalution of ideals, purity, & purpose"

Asks for audiences to "draw his own conclusions and make his own errors"

No plot, minimal staging, babbling.

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Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, meet near a tree. They converse on various topics and reveal that they are waiting there for a man named Godot. While they wait, two other men enter. Pozzo is on his way to the market to sell his slave, Lucky. He pauses for a while to converse with Vladimir and Estragon.

Example of a circular structured play

Simple set usually consisting of a mound of dirt and a single tree

Many different ways to interpret. Does Gadot really exist?  Are Vlad and Estragon actually alive? Are they stuck in Limbo?  Is Gadot acutally dead and the body under the mound?  Who exactly are Lucky and Pozzo.

Amazing example for Absurdist theatre

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Born April 13, 1906 (Good Friday) in Dublin ; Died December 22, 1989 in Paris

When tot the same school as Oscar Wilde.

Suffered from severe depression as a youth

1928 Found home in Paris, France and became a student of author James Joyce

Fought the resistance movement in France until 1942 when his group was arrested by the gestapo. He & his wife fled to the unoccupied zone until the end of the war then moved back to Paris.

In 5 years he wrote

Waiting for Gadot (play)

Endgame (play)

Malloy (novel)

Malone Dies (novel)

The Unnamable (novel)

Mercier et Camier (novel)

2 books of short stories

book of criticism

Waiting for Gadot was his first success running for 400 performances in France.\

His plays Gadot, Endgame, & Happy days were considered instrument in the "theatre of the absurd".

dark humor similar to contemporary existentialist theatre

Wrongly labeled an existentialist writer based on an essay by Martin Esslin who used Gadot as the centerpiece for his book (he coined the term TotA). However, Beckett had little affinity for existentialism as a whole.

Beckett's plays were one of despair and the will to survive anyways.

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Born November 26, 1909 in Romania; Died March 28, 1994 in Paris, France

Spent most of his childhood in France

Had an experience that shaped the way he viewed the world.

"Walking in summer sunshine in a white-washed provincial village under an intense blue sky, [Ionesco] was profoundly altered by the light."[3] He was struck very suddenly with a feeling of intense luminosity, the feeling of floating off the ground and an overwhelming feeling of well-being. When he "floated" back to the ground and the "light" left him, he saw that the real world in comparison was full of decay, corruption and meaningless repetitive action. Had a revelation that death takes us all in the end.

His later works reflect this in subjects such as disgust for the tangible word, distrust of communication, and the feeling that there's a better world just out of reach.

Plays: (which he called anti-plays)

The Bold Saprano

Jack ( or The Submission)

The Lesson

Salutations

The Chairs

The Future is in Eggs

Victims of Duty

The New Tenant

These plays express modern feelings of alienation and the impossibility and futility of communication with surreal comic force, parodying the conformism of the bourgeoisie and conventional theatrical forms. In them Ionesco rejects a conventional story-line as their basis, instead taking their dramatic structure from accelerating rhythms and/or cyclical repetitions.

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He was born August 11, 1933, Rzeszów, Poland

Grotowski was the international leader of the experimental theatre movement and became famous in the 1960s as the director of productions staged by the Polish Laboratory Theatre of Wrocław.

Grotowski’s permanent company first appeared in western Europe in 1966.

His performers were disciplined masters of bodily and vocal contortions.

His productions included Faustus(1963), Hamlet (1964), and The Constant Prince (1965).

Grotowski’s methods and pronouncements, which can be found in his highly influential work Towards a Poor Theatre (1968), influenced such U.S. experimental theatre movements as The Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, and the Performance Group. In 1969 the Laboratory Theatre made a successful U.S. debut in New York City with Akropolis,based on a 1904 play by Stanisław Wyspiański.

In 1982 Grotowski immigrated to the United States, where he taught for several years before moving to Pontedera, Italy.

Grotowski later died on January 14, 1999 in Pontedera, Italy.