A Theory of Theater

by Kirk Woodward

[I don’t think I need to introduce Kirk Woodward to readers of Rick On Theater as he’s by far the most prolific guest blogger on ROT.  Even occasional readers of this blog will probably know that I’ve known Kirk for a long time, almost 60 years.  

[Those of you who’ve checked in on ROT now and then and caught more than a couple of Kirk’s posts will also know that he’s conversant in a number of subjects, in and out of theater.  In the field of theater, though, he’s experienced in playwriting, composing, directing, acting, teaching, and reviewing; he knows theater history and theory, and he’s posted on all of these topics. 

[Here, he’s put all these fields of his experience together and attempts to formulate an inclusive theory of theater.  I think he’s onto something . . . but I’ll let you all decide for yourselves if he’s come up with anything comprehensible, comprehensive, and sensible.  (Feel free to let us know.)

[I’ll have a few more things to say at the end of Kirk’s discussion, but for now, just give “A Theory of Theater” a read and see what you think.  ~Rick]

The impact of the German playwright Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) on contemporary theater can hardly be overestimated. This impact persists although his earliest work is now a century old. Brecht began his career in the 1920’s; he wrote his most important plays in the 1930’s and 1940’s; his most famous directorial efforts date from the early 1950’s.

One could say the same, however, of the plays and directing of George S. Kaufman (1889-1961), and a case could be made that Kaufman’s plays have been widely influential. I doubt that anyone makes that argument. Why not?

The major difference between the influences of Brecht and Kaufman on theater is that Kaufman wrote purely for entertainment, while Brecht asked, and tried to answer, a fundamental question. That question is: why theater at all? What good is it? Why should we bother with it? What is its purpose, and is it a worthwhile purpose?

When I say “theater” I’m talking about an array of people and activities that together make up what Brittanica.com calls

a collaborative form of performing art that uses live performers, usually actors or actresses, to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place, often a stage.

As this definition suggests, in this article when I say “theater” I am necessarily implying “performance.” The emphasis on which component of theater we’re talking about may of necessity shift. It has to: theater, a “collaborative form,” is necessarily made up of numerous related component parts. 

For example, an actor plays a role and a role needs an actor; the playwright typically creates the basis of the role that the actor then embodies; the audience sees an actor in a role in a play created by the playwright; and so on. The various components combine as theater.

To return to our theme, the issue of the purpose of theater is always a challenge. When a director, a producer, or a theater chooses a play to produce, the question “Why are we doing this now?” is a revealing one. Do we think the play has something to say? Do we care? Is our decision a purely personal one – “I'm doing the play because I like it”? Is it perhaps “just” entertainment – and is that a bad thing?

The best place to read Brecht’s views on these questions is the splendid collection of his writings Brecht on Theatre (Hill and Wang, 1964), translated and edited by John Willett (1917-2002), a noted Brecht scholar. Brecht was a compulsive theorist; Willett’s book is quite comprehensive but still is a selection, by no means the totality, of Brecht’s theater writing.

Brecht asserts that most theater is on the wrong track, because most theater has no purpose at all except to give a good show. He proposes an alternative:

[Theater] demands not only a certain technological level but a powerful movement in society which is interested to see vital questions freely aired with a view to their solution, and can defend this interest against every contrary trend.

Brecht proposes a solution based on the ideology of the theorist of communism, Karl Marx (1818-1883):

Unless the actor is satisfied to be a parrot or a monkey he must master our period’s knowledge of human social life by himself joining in the war of the classes. Some people may feel this to be degrading, because they rank art, once the money side has been settled, as one of the highest things; but mankind’s highest decisions are in fact fought out on earth, not in the heavens; in the ‘external’ world, not inside people’s heads. Nobody can stand above the warring classes, for nobody can stand above the human race. Society cannot share a common communication system as long as it is split into warring classes. Thus for art to be ‘unpolitical’ means only to ally itself with the ‘ruling’ group.

So the choice of viewpoint is also a major element of the actor’s art, and it has to be decided outside the theatre. Like the transformation of nature, that of society is a liberating act; and it is the joys of liberation which the theatre of a scientific age has got to convey.

Embedded in this passage (from “A Short Organum for the Theatre,” written, 1948; published in German, 1949; published in English, 1951) are the essentials of Brecht’s theory of theater: that his principles are “scientific,” and therefore unarguable; that art’s purpose is liberation from the oppression of class distinctions (a liberation described and predicted by Karl Marx); and that it is possible for an actor to embody a social point of view within a performance of a play.

Brecht’s notions of inevitability, of the “new audience,” and of the “scientific” approach to theater, seem to me highly debatable, and I have never been convinced that his theories of acting are unique. (In any case, Brecht himself said he had seldom if ever seen them succeed in practice.)

However, my purpose here is not to argue with specifics of Brecht’s theories, but to point out that Brecht's idea is not the only theory of theater possible. Whatever its truth, it is highly selective, and I’d contend that a theory of the use of theater should cover as much territory as possible

 

So here is my suggestion for a theory of theater: 

In theater, actors demonstrate how people behave under different types and conditions of stress.

I will refer to this as the “Stress Theory.” The sociologist Earl Babbie (b. 1938) defines stress theory as “a social theory that explains observations about stress, an aspect of social life.” I am adapting his term to this discussion of theater.

Oxford Languages, the dictionary-publishing arm of Oxford University Press, defines stress as “a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances.” This will do in general for a discussion of theater. It's safe to say we have all encountered stress in one form or another. 

An assumption behind this theory is that as human beings we not only do things, but we watch ourselves doing them. We don’t want to just live our lives; at some level we want to examine them, to get some perspective on them, to see what we might do with them, and we do – among other means, through theater.

Eric Bentley (1916-2020), in his landmark book The Life of the Drama (1964), says:

 

The theatrical situation, reduced to a minimum, is that A impersonates B while C looks on. Such impersonation is universal among small children, and such playing of a part is not wholly distinct from the other playing that children do. . . . Impersonation is only half of this little scheme. The other half is watching – or, from the viewpoint of A, being watched. Even when there is actually no spectator, an impersonator imagines that there is, often by dividing himself into two, the actor and his audience. 

 

In day–to–day life, Bentley asserts, we internalize the experience of theater – basically, we maintain a theater in our own minds. This, if I’m not mistaken, was the important insight of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) about the philosophy of Rene Descartes (1596-1650).  

 

Descartes famously posited that “I think, therefore I am,” found in Discourse on the Method (1637), Sartre (in Being and Nothingness, 1943; English: 1956) pointed out that this is incomplete; who is it who’s observing this process? Who is it who notices that because I think, therefore I am? We are necessarily observers of our own lives, Sartre says, I believe correctly.

 

I’m from Louisville, Kentucky, and as children my sisters and I used to attend its State Fair each year, paying attention to the rides and avoiding the agricultural exhibits. One year I broke that pattern, went to look at the spectacular vegetables and extraordinary animals, and I realized for the first time that for the farmers who presented these items, the fair was their self-examination, a way of presenting and observing what it was that they did all year for an occupation.

 

Brecht would probably agree. In fact, he based his theory of theater on his stated belief that a new audience had formed, an audience that wanted to examine and probe its own existence, with the aim of changing and improving it.

 

I’m not proposing a new audience; I am proposing that we all are that audience, even in everyday life, and that this need to observe and evaluate our own lives is a powerful force behind theater.

 

How eager the desire of the “universal audience” is for change is debatable. Surely a large part of any audience goes to the theater to relieve the pressure of change, or simply (which may be the same thing) to have a good time for a while.

 

Nevertheless, what the audience sees in the theater is a demonstration of human behavior. As Brecht himself said, “Good or bad, a play always contains an image of the world.”  

 

The playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) puts it this way:

 

Though plays have neither political constitutions nor established churches, they must all, if they are to be anything more than the merest tissue of stage effects, have a philosophy, even if it be no more than an unconscious expression of the author’s temperament.

 

Shaw, it seems to me, is more on the mark than Brecht is when he (Brecht) says that all plays must have “political constitutions,” since they can only be about social issues. I see the point, but that claim seems too restrictive to me.

 

How about Shaw’s word “philosophy,” though? Could it be interpreted broadly enough to include the many varied forms of theater? Of course Shaw, like Brecht, would reply that his plays were instruments for social change – that he was an agitator for change.

 

Aside from whether that’s actually true (it doesn’t apply to all Shaw’s plays by any means – for example, not to 1897’s Candida, or to the delightful In Good King Charles’ s Golden Days of 1939), it also is a partial approach unless we define the word “social” so broadly that it loses its meaning altogether. (For an examination of all Shaw’s plays, see Woodward’s five-part “Re-Reading Shaw,” 3 July-2 September 2016. Candida is in the first installment and King Charles is in the last.)

 

We’re looking for a theory of theater with more scope.

 

Therefore:

 

In theater, actors demonstrate how people behave under different types and conditions of stress.

 

This definition is not exclusive to theater. I was tempted to write “live actors” rather than “actors” in order to differentiate theater from movies, but why bother? “Boundaries” in art are fluid. Movies certainly draw on the principles of theater, just as theater today often seems increasingly cinematic. 

 

In any case, stress – still to be discussed – is the principal stuff of theater. I don’t see that the same is true of all art forms. A lyric poem, for example, may take as its subject a condition of stress, or it may not, and although a poet may find that writing the poem is stressful, that condition is not a necessary part of the poem itself. 

 

Does the word “stress” seem too trivial to encompass the scope of theater? A more prevalent one in theater circles is “conflict” – actors are often urged to discover the conflict(s) between characters in a scene. Other words used in similar contexts include “anxiety,” “need,” and “want,” although those are not always exactly synonyms.

 

“Want,” for example, is a time-honored question for an actor to ask while preparing a role – “What do I (as the character) want?” “Need” may push the question even further, and thinking in terms of “anxiety” certainly helps identify the pressure of a moment in a scene.

 

From the audience’s point of view, though, I still prefer the word “stress.” It’s true that the label “stress” may be applied to the smallest things – I frequently tell myself I’m “stressed” about minutiae. People may claim they’re stressed when to our eyes there’s nothing wrong with their lives at all.

 

However, shouldn’t theater be able to handle such small-bore items as well as the big ones? In fact it does – particularly in the kinds of plays we label as comedy or farce.

 

Oxford Languages defines stress as “a state of mental or emotional strain or tension resulting from adverse or very demanding circumstances,” and goes on to define the verb form of the word as “to subject to pressure or tension.”

 

A stress fracture, to pick a small example, is nothing to laugh about. The continents, to pick a huge example, are under constant stress with shifts in the tectonic plates, resulting in not-at-all-trivial phenomena such as earthquakes and volcanoes. “Stress” is a powerful word.

 

Theater shows us how people behave under conditions of stress. We have plenty of stress in our own lives; theater gives us examples that we can look at without necessarily being stressed by them ourselves.

 

In comedy and in farce we can look at the stresses that people are under – and those are serious stresses for them – and laugh at them. In tragedy we can become involved in the stress of the collision of mighty forces – and still survive them, perhaps a little changed by the experience (“purged,” Aristotle says), perhaps not.

 

Death of a Salesman, written by Arthur Miller (1915-2005), first performed in 1947, and often referred to as an “American tragedy,” illustrates the range of stresses that may burden a character such as Willy Loman, the “salesman” of the title, including the knowledge that he has failed both his family and his job, his only reasons for living. 

 

In comedy and in farce, on the other hand, we can look at the stresses that people are under – and those are serious stresses for them – and laugh at them.

 

In The Odd Couple, written by Neil Simon (1927-2018), the two characters of the title, Oscar Madison and Felix Unger, share an apartment and experience the stress of the clash of their personalities, which are diametrical opposites. To them the results are catastrophic. For the audience, they are funny – in proportion to how seriously the characters take what might otherwise be considered mere irritations.

 

This idea of the presentation of stress illuminates the difficulty of writing a play that promotes a “message,” a point of view. By the nature of theater, the playwright has the obligation to present a stress-filled collision of forces. If one side of the collision is minimized for the sake of “special pleading” of the playwright’s point of view, the stress, and therefore the play, is weakened. (Some, it should be noted, felt this was the case with Death of a Salesman).

 

For instance, Rolf Hochhuth (1931-2020) wrote a play called The Deputy (1963) which essentially accused Pope Pius XII (1876-1958; papacy: 1939-1958) of ignoring the Nazi persecution of the Jews. The play (which was originally 8 hours long, plenty of stress for an audience as well as for admirers of the Pope) had some success although it clearly championed a particular point of view.

 

But Fr. Edward A. Molloy (1903-1986) then wrote a play (The Comforter, 1964) to refute Hochhuth’s play, and it had no chance of success of any sort (and no success), because any element of stress in the play was overwhelmed by its single point of view. Theater, the arena of stress, is no place for pat answers.

 

Shaw was aware of this problem when he wrote his play St. Joan (1923). Shaw knew that his audiences would almost certainly be on Joan’s side, so he gave the best arguments in the play, not to her, but to her opponents. How Joan handles that stress is virtually the story of the play.

 

If there is anything to the theory of theater we’re discussing here – that theater demonstrates how people of all sorts deal with all sorts stress – what are the implications of this idea? One is that little or nothing is outside the scope of theater because we live in a world of stress from the time we’re born.

 

Brecht’s plays fit comfortably in the Stress Theory; so do Neil Simon’s. Their emphases are of course extremely different, but as far as I can tell, the Stress Theory has room for everything human – nothing is ruled out.

 

What’s more, the Stress Theory puts comedy and tragedy (as well as other genres) on an equal footing. Comedy often gets treated as an inferior variant on “great,” serious drama. It’s easy to illustrate this point – how many comedies win major drama prizes, not to mention Academy Awards?

 

On the contrary, anyone who has worked in the field of comedy knows it’s a difficult, even treacherous arena. Even doing comedy is a form of stress, as many actors will attest. (“Dying is easy, comedy is hard,” the actor Edmund Gwenn is supposed to have said on his deathbed in 1959.)

 

The kinds of stress in comedic plays, if we examine them, often turn out to be of major significance, even if the way they’re demonstrated makes us laugh. Many comedies and farces center on the stresses of marriage – in The Odd Couple the marriages of both have fallen apart. Separation and divorce are not in themselves funny at all. The Odd Couple, on the other hand, is.

 

Theater will always be about stress – it can’t help it. Demonstrating stress is its nature. By the same token theater can relieve stress by providing an outlet for unexpressed feelings, by reminding us that others have gone through the same things, by diverting our attention.

 

It can also raise the level of stress in the audience – as is the aim of “political” theater when it tries to create enough stress that people will take action. Brecht of course maintained that his plays aimed at achieving exactly that. Theater therefore can change people, according to the kind of stress it demonstrates and the way it demonstrates it – at least in theory.

 

The Stress Theory should provide useful perspectives for directors and designers of theatrical productions because it provides a dynamic way in which to read and analyze the play. It illuminates Brecht and Beckett equally well, although the kinds of stresses their plays demonstrate are radically different, Brecht’s being primarily social and Beckett’s primarily internal.

A director or designer, then, may decide to create an environment for a particular play that emphasizes the stresses of social relationships (in Brecht's case) or is less specific or more impressionistic, and perhaps more threatening (in Beckett's). 

 

The Stress Theory also sheds an interesting light on disputes about the nature of acting, including, for example, the question to what degree actors transform themselves into characters, becoming less themselves and more the characters they are playing. (I have written elsewhere in this blog about the fascinating 2022 book The Method by Isaac Butler [posted on 12 March 2022], which vividly portrays many such disputes.)

 

In terms of the Stress Theory, those questions don’t matter. Actors in a play, according to the theory, demonstrate stress, and the demonstration is what the audience sees and experiences. How the actor achieves the demonstration is the actor’s business.

 

All that the audience sees is the demonstration, which of course may also vary from performance to performance – but one demonstration at a time is all an audience sees. The same is true even in theatrical productions that are partially or completely improvised.

 

Does the Stress Theory apply to dance theater, when trained dancers demonstrate a story performed to music? I would say definitely yes. Does it apply to non–Western forms of theater? I don’t know enough to say. I suspect, though, that it does.  

 

Whatever the merits of the Stress Theory as presented here, I can affirm that it’s been useful to me as I think about theater, whether I’m reading plays or seeing them (and even as I read about them in reviews and in critical writing).

 

I also find that it frees me from the need to decide that one particular way of doing theater is the only way. And it sharpens my perception of what plays are and how they work. So I suspect there’s something to it.

 

[I’ve inserted into this post some cross-references to previous posts on ROT that directly relate to something Kirk has raised in “A Theory of Theater.”  There are a few other older posts that are only tangentially pertinent to Kirk’s subject, and I want to draw ROTters’ attentions to them in the event that anyone’s interested in looking a little further into Kirk’s points and ideas.

 

[First, in order of appearance in “A Theory,” is Kirk’s question, “Why are we doing this now?”  I pointed out to Kirk that this is two-thirds of the base questions dramaturgs and literary managers are supposed to ask their artistic directors or producers: Why this play?  Why now?  Why here [i.e., in this theater or this town/for our audience]?  ROT has only one article devoted to this subject: “Dramaturgy: The Conscience of the Theater,” posted on 30 December 2009.  It mentions the Three Questions twice.

 

[Next, Kirk presents an interpretation of Bertolt Brecht’s position “that it is possible for an actor to embody a social point of view within a performance of a play.”   This is the essence of avant-garde director Leonardo Shapiro’s “testimony”—which he derived from Brecht.  I’ve blogged many times now on the theater work and theories of Shapiro, whom I knew for about 15 years before his death in 1997 at 52. 

 

[Leo’s acting technique of testimony, a focus of his theater work, was one of the subjects of my post “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character” (25 September 2013), in which Leo explains: “[T]he actors address the audience directly as themselves—using [the character’s] words . . . but speaking for themselves as actors, artists and citizens . . . .”

 

[Leo further elucidated how he expected his actors to accomplish testimony: “[C]ross document our lives with [the] characters’ lives, our props with theirs, our gestures with theirs, our voices with theirs,” so the actors would speak of themselves through the dialogue.  Clearly, this is a difficult technique, which Leo adapted from Polish theater theorist Jerzy Grotowski amalgamated with elements of Brechtian theory.  In fact, Kirk doesn’t think it’s even possible.

 

[For some less direct references to “A Theory,” there are the following posts on ROT:

 

·   Kirk writes that “theater today often seems increasingly cinematic” and I immediately think of Tennessee Williams as a relatively early example of this phenomenon.  In my post “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater” (9 May 2012), I broach the subject of the cinematic nature of Williams’s plays, with reference to a 1967 essay by George Brandt, “Cinematic Structure in the Work of Tennessee Williams,” in a book of essays called American Theatre (London: Edward Arnold, 1967).

·   Kirk asks, “Does the word ‘stress’ seem too trivial to encompass the scope of theater?  It’s not the only word used in discussions like this one,” and introduces the notion of “conflict” as the engine that drives the drama.  Feminist playwright’s, notably Karen Malpede, say that conflict is an outmoded engine of drama (because they identify it as violent and masculine, even macho). 

 

In my 1992 interview with Malpede, she talks about this, and I republished the transcript on ROT: “An Interview with Karen Malpede (1992)” (5 November 2014).  I don’t know how Malpede would respond to stress as a substitute for conflict, but she was writing plays—when I knew her—without conflict at their center.

·   There’s a discussion of Hochhuth’s The Deputy in my post “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama” (9 October 2009); the play features significantly in the entire piece as a prime example of the documentary play. 

 

I mention Molloy’s The Comforter in both “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010) and “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011).  (In those two posts is mention also of a second response play to The Deputy: El vicario de Dios [“God’s vicar” or “God’s deputy,” 1965] by Juan Antonio de Laiglesia, produced in Madrid.)

·   Finally, near the end of his examination of Stress Theory in theater, Kirk wonders, “Does the Stress Theory apply to dance theater . . .?”  I posted an article on “Dancing & Acting” (9 June 2010) in which I sort of address this question.  I didn't use Kirk’s term, of course, or any similar expression, but that was at the base of what I was writing about.

 

In the same paragraph, Kirk asks if stress applies to non-Western plays.  From the types I know (Indian kathakali and bharata natyam; Japanese noh, kabuki, and kyogen; Chinese opera; the Indonesian wayangs), I’d say it does.  I did two papers that focus on the acting in Asian theater forms: “The Natyasastra” (15 January 2019), which examines the parallels between the acting of Sanskrit-based classic Indian actors and Stanislavskian training; and “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams” (1 November 2010), which looks at the ways kabuki actors express emotions on stage in their highly codified performance form.]