III.

Purposes of Theater

Theater can serve many ends. It can be designed to entertain, instruct, motivate, persuade, and even shock. But whatever the intentions of the director, performers, and crew, the result depends on the interaction with an audience. The audience for theater differs from the reader of a novel or the viewer of a painting in that it assembles as a group at a given time and place to share in the performance with the actors and all the surrounding elements of light, sound, music, costumes, and scenery. The audience affects the performance by providing the performers with immediate feedback, such as laughter, tears, applause, or silence. Each night there is continuous interaction between the auditorium and the stage.

Some audiences want only to be entertained. Others want the theater to provide new insight and understanding about political, social, or personal issues. Throughout history theater has reflected and, at times, commented on the society in which it takes place. In many repressive and authoritarian regimes theater provides entertainment to distract audiences from the brutal conditions under which they live or to serve as lessons in the virtues of the ruling powers. In Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, for example, theater and motion pictures were used to extol the virtues of Adolf Hitler’s regime.

Ultimately, audiences make their opinions known through their attendance or nonattendance. They support what appeals to them and generally fail to support what they find distasteful, offensive, or incomprehensible.

The terms presentational theater and representational theater are often used to describe two different approaches to accomplishing the goals of a production. A presentational style offers a performance with full recognition that the actors are at work on a stage, speaking and acting out a script with music, under lights, and in costumes. There is no attempt to disguise the fact that a theatrical performance is taking place to entertain or instruct audiences. Plays from ancient Greece and from the time of English playwright William Shakespeare are produced in this forthright manner, as are many modern experimental plays. Musicals and traditional Asian theater also fall into this general category.

A representational style of production evolved in Europe in the mid-19th century as writers, directors, and designers set about to show candid truths about ordinary existence within recognizable environments. Two movements—realism in the 1850s and naturalism in the 1870s—presented familiar characters in specific environments, such as living rooms, kitchens, or flophouses. The purpose of the detailed environment was to show how a person’s character and life choices are determined in part by environmental or social forces and in part by gender or genetic forces. Visual elements—such as clothing, furnishings, and stage properties—became very specific to the environment. Actors worked within a picture-frame stage—a stage separated from the audience by an arch or rectangular frame—with the understanding that the imaginary fourth wall of their environment was removed to allow audiences to look into the lives of the characters. Dramatists who pioneered the writing of plays for the new realist production style include Henrik Ibsen of Norway, August Strindberg of Sweden, Émile Zola of France, and Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov of Russia.