Continental Stagecraft

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: T CHAPTER II THE LIVING STAGE is something in the nature of the theater that makes Realism a natural and a thoroughly unsatisfactory method of expression. Its principal material, jthe actor, is too near actuality. It is no triumph of art to make allesR-and-blood man named Grant Mitchell into a flesh-and-...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: T CHAPTER II THE LIVING STAGE is something in the nature of the theater that makes Realism a natural and a thoroughly unsatisfactory method of expression. Its principal material, jthe actor, is too near actuality. It is no triumph of art to make allesR-and-blood man named Grant Mitchell into a flesh-and- blood man named Andrew Lane. Especially when the heart of the whole business is an elaborate pretense that there really isn't any actor, and there really isn't any theater, and we are really looking through the fourth wall of a room in the next village. Obviously no other art is ?o close to life or so quick with lifeV vitalityLiter-ature uses printed signs of a very arbitrary and formal nature, which we translate into words forming ideas .and mental pictures, which, in turn, may suggest human beings and their emotions. Music employs sounds some of which faintly suggest bird-notes or the rumble of the heavens, but none of which comes within shouting distance of the human voice. Painting has pieces of canvas and lumps of colored clays, and these it arranges in patterns, through which, bycustom and habit, we jijeabletQgain an. ompressiane-ji curiously flattened life. Even sculpture literal- as itS-roundcdr three-dimensional jhapes ordinarily are, must use theitrtef- r. rock: The theater is the one art that 7' works jbl. the?materials of life itself. It employs lifetcT r J render life. Painting, architecture, and sculpture may supply ajbackground to the actor, but the actor is the center of. the jjlaypand when he speaks the words of literature he speaks them as the actual human being from whom they are supposed to come. The actor brings the theater far too close to life to please jspme of itFgrealpvers The actuality of the actor affrights them. Gordon Cr...