Courses

Theater, like other arts, often seeks to imitate reality, to present life as it is, to be—for lack of a better word—real. For many reasons, however, reality in the theater is a particularly troubling ideal. First and foremost, what counts as a good representation of reality changes over time. Secondly, realism, the particular style that most contemporary media claim when they are “realistic,” was born in the nineteenth century and was and is a highly contested category. Third, and perhaps most importantly, theater is always in some sense real in ways that most other art forms are not: theater really presents real bodies in real space and real time.

This course considers theater and its relationship to what we might call “the real.” Our focus is on how theater has represented reality, particularly since the rise of realism in the 1880s and 1890s. We will insist, first and foremost, that realism is a style with a specific history and a set of evolving, but essential practices that produce its effects. But we will also struggle with the distance between realism and reality, with theater’s phenomenological reality, and with the many non-realist theaters that nonetheless purport to present real life. In short, we aim to understand why and how—in production practices, acting techniques, narrative forms, and more—people attempt to stage the real.