The Routledge Companion to Theatre of the Oppressed

Kelly Howe, Julian Boal, José Soeiro, Kelly Howe, Julian Boal, José Soeiro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032093796
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351967969
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Théâtre

This dynamic book offers a comprehensive companion to the theory and practice of Theatre of the Oppressed. Developed by Brazilian director and theorist Augusto Boal, these theatrical forms invite people to mobilize their knowledge and rehearse struggles against oppression.

Featuring a diverse array of voices (many of them as yet unheard in the academic world), the book hosts dialogues on the following questions, among others:

• Why and how did Theatre of the Oppressed develop?
• What are the differences between the 1970s (when Theatre of the Oppressed began) and today?
• How has Theatre of the Oppressed been shaped by local and global shifts of the last 40-plus years?
• Why has Theatre of the Oppressed spread or "multiplied" across so many geographic, national, and cultural borders?
• How has Theatre of the Oppressed been shaped by globalization, "development," and neoliberalism?
• What are the stakes, challenges, and possibilities of Theatre of the Oppressed today?
• How can Theatre of the Oppressed balance practical analysis of what is with ambitious insistence on what could be?
• How can Theatre of the Oppressed hope, but concretely?

Broad in scope yet rich in detail, The Routledge Companion to Theatre of the Oppressed contains practical and critical content relevant to artists, activists, teachers, students, and researchers.

PART I

Roots

Genealogies

1

NEW YORK AND AFTER

Gassner, realism, and the “method”

Frances Babbage

Augusto Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992) carried a bold endorsement on its back cover: for Richard Schechner, Boal had “achieved what Brecht only dreamt of and wrote about: making a useful theatre that is entertaining, fun, and instructive.”¹ Where Bertolt Brecht sought a new kind of audience appropriate for the “scientific age,” profoundly involved yet skeptically alert, Boal took that impulse further by proposing a “spect-actor” who would not just deconstruct the dramatic scene intellectually, but could remake it actively.² His indebtedness to Brecht is plain; further, Boal’s reminder that Brecht “wanted the theatrical spectacle to be the beginning of action” implicitly upholds Schechner’s distinction.³ Yet an equally important, if less obvious, influence on Boal’s developing practice was the realist tradition associated with Konstantin Stanislavski. Boal undertook formal theatre training in New York, at a point when “serious” drama—as opposed to Broadway musicals, then enjoying a “golden age”—predominantly meant psychological realism. Many of realism’s core tenets seem antithetical to the Theatre of the Oppressed: emphasis on subjective experience, rather than social image; empathic identification, rather than objective analysis; and above all, faithful representation of the world as it is, rather than a resistant staging which reveals that world as dynamic and changeable. Nonetheless, while Boal recognized the limitations of realism, he did not react against the version he encountered on the US stage. Indeed, he took inspiration from it: Boal’s early work at the Arena Theatre put principles of realist drama and rehearsal directly into practice. In his 2001 autobiography Hamlet and the Baker’s Son, he emphasized that studying Stanislavski had been a “cornerstone” of his career and would “always […] be [his] main point of reference as a director.”⁴ This affirmation should draw our attention to the ways in which even the activist, participatory, and concertedly “anti-illusionist” Theatre of the Oppressed system developed subsequently still bears traces of the realist model.

The opportunity to go to New York arose for Boal as a fortuitous by-product of his official studies in chemical engineering, the career path endorsed by his father and for which Boal was offered the enticement of an extra year of training abroad. He chose the US over Europe on discovering that he would be able to join a playwriting class taught by theatre critic and historian John Gassner, whose work he had read and admired.⁵ Enrolled at Columbia University, initially for 1953–1954 but remaining for a further year, Boal took courses in modern drama, Shakespeare, and the Greeks, as well as more practically oriented tuition in directing and playwriting (and, somehow or other, fitting in chemistry lessons amongst all these). His teachers included Gassner, Theodore Apstein, Maurice Valency, and Norris Houghton, all men of the theatre as much as they were scholars of drama: Apstein and Valency were playwrights and Houghton a producer and designer. Houghton was also a pioneer in the development of off-Broadway theatre, co-founding the Phoenix Theatre with Edward Hambleton in 1953. The Phoenix opened shortly after Boal went to New York: he would have had the chance to watch The Seagull, staged in the first season, directed by Houghton himself and with Montgomery Clift as Treplev. Boal undertook to see as much theatre as possible while in the US, going several times a week, and he had the opportunity to see many great plays, actors, and directors, as well as plenty more run-of-the-mill fare: Robert Anderson’s acclaimed realist dramas Tea and Sympathy (1953–1955) and All Summer Long (1954); James Dean performing in The Immoralist (1954); and Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, directed by Elia Kazan (1955). Realism was not the only style on offer, however, even if it dominated the “serious” stage. There were crowd-pleasing musicals, whether new (By the Beautiful Sea, 1954) or in revival (Showboat, 1954), and sparkling comedies, such as John Patrick’s novel adaptation The Teahouse of the August Moon (1953–1956), or Anouilh’s Mademoiselle Colombe, playfully staged by Harold Clurman (1954). New York in the 1950s saw just one production of a Brecht play, but it was notable: an extraordinarily successful off-Broadway mounting of The Threepenny Opera (1954), with Lotte Lenya as Pirate Jenny, which ran for 96 performances.⁶ All the while, his studies at Columbia gave Boal an informed understanding of theatre history and, with this, the often-fraught relation between thematic content, aesthetic form, the mechanics of production, and the judgments of audiences. Simultaneously, under Gassner’s tutelage and alongside fellow amateurs at the Writers’ Group in Brooklyn, Boal was developing plays of his own: in the period, two of these (The Horse and the Saint and The House Across the Street) were produced, and a third (Martim Pescador, described drily by its author as a work of “poignant naturalism”) given a university award.⁷ Boal’s wide-eyed, curious gaze on New York’s cultural scene, along with his acute sense of himself as a foreigner within it, brought him close to the state Gassner considered ideal for the trainee playwright: “if [the writer] learns to look into himself and around himself sharply and individually enough,” his tutor had argued in a 1951 essay, “he will be refreshed and strengthened not only for one particular bout of playwriting but for all subsequent bouts.”⁸

From Boal’s lively account of the New York period in Hamlet and the Baker’s Son, it is evident that the experience of place proved overwhelming as well as inspiring. Culturally disoriented, and forced at first into a solitary lifestyle at odds with his gregarious nature, Boal did not truly find his feet until a chance encounter with poet and activist Langston Hughes, with whom he had a mutual friend in Brazilian playwright Abdias Nascimento, drew him first to Harlem, and then inspired him to claim the role of volunteer reporter for the São Paulo daily paper the Correio Paulistano. As self-styled “international journalist” he moved with greater confidence, meeting notable figures including teachers of acting Stella Adler and Harold Clurman, and stage and screen director Elia Kazan.⁹ Adler, Clurman, and Kazan were in different ways all proponents of the “intense, earnestly concentrated” mode of psychological realism that had risen in popularity to the point of dominating the [US] American stage.¹⁰ Through Gassner’s influence, Boal was able to observe rehearsals at the Actors Studio, the preeminent locus for training in this style. The experience made a profound impression on him:

Since those Actors Studio sessions, I have had a fascination for actors who truly live their characters – rather than those who pretend to. To see an actor transforming him/herself, giving life to his/her dormant potentialities, is marvellous. It is the best way to understand the human being: seeing an actor create.¹¹

Boal was impressed by the extraordinary commitment he witnessed at the Studio, the actors’ efforts to bind self to role, and the revelatory, explosive performances that could result. Yet such methods had evident limitations: whether one person or an entire cast were thus schooled, the determination to remain deeply “in character” and “authentic” brought with it qualities of self-absorption, unpredictability, and inconsistency that were not always beneficial to the whole.

The Actors Studio was co-founded in 1947—by Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, and Robert Lewis—as a non-profit school teaching Stanislavski-inspired techniques which became known simply as “the Method.” By the 1950s, the Studio had not only established many stage careers but, for actors such as Marlon Brando, Eva-Marie Saint, and Montgomery Clift, had led to Hollywood fame also. The Studio’s then-director was Lee Strasberg, a man with the “aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst,” who, with Clurman, had set up the New York-based Group Theatre (1931–1941), of which both Kazan and Adler were members.¹² While the Studio’s approach—a refinement of that practiced by the Group—had its roots in Stanislavski’s teaching, the Method was a narrow and even distorted version of this source. The Group’s practices had themselves rested on an incomplete understanding of Stanislavski’s principles, acquired in the 1920s at the American Laboratory Theatre (envisaged as the US counterpart of the Moscow Arts Theatre) set up by former MAT students Richard Boleslavsky and Maria Ouspenskaya.¹³ Strasberg and Clurman were fascinated by Russian acting theory, inspired by what they could discover not just about Stanislavski but Vsevelod Meyerhold and Yevgeny Vakhtangov, as well as by the MAT productions that had toured to the US in 1923.¹⁴ However, what took strongest hold for the Group was Stanislavski’s emphasis on the actor’s experience, memory, and emotion, which formed the bedrock of dramatic creativity.¹⁵ The Group referred closely to “Preparing for the Role,” an essay by Stanislavski’s pupil Vakhtangov that Strasberg had had translated, which urged the actor to “live your own temperament on the stage and not the supposed temperament of the character. You must proceed from yourself and not from a conceived image.”¹⁶ The actor’s inner life was indeed an important element for Stanslavski, but primarily in the early stages of his work: as Marvin Carlson notes, by 1930 the director’s thinking had changed significantly, leading him to place greater importance on study of the text, physical actions, and the “given circumstances” of characters.¹⁷ That shift of emphasis was not reflected in the work of the Group, nor at the Actors Studio. Indeed, their (mis)interpretation of Stanislavski appeared validated on release of An Actor Prepares (1936), which was first published in the US. Unbeknownst to Strasberg and his associates, although the book did reiterate the advice that “Always and for ever, when you are on the stage, you must play yourself” (emphasis in original), this US version missed out on many essays that Stanislavski had intended to include, making it less comprehensive and representative of his thinking than the (much longer) Soviet edition issued two years later.¹⁸

By the 1950s, the interior and affective basis of “the Method” was deeply entrenched. The Studio that Boal visited was an aspirational place for actors, even though its training was demanding and even painful: as Kazan recalls, Strasberg’s approach regularly included manipulating his pupils’ actual emotions—anxiety, unhappiness, anger—when he sensed they were merely “pretending.”¹⁹ However, the potent results of this training were not in doubt: regrettably, Boal arrived too late for Marlon Brando’s brooding, emotionally charged portrayal of Stanley in the Broadway premiere of A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), a performance that became a byword for Method acting (albeit Brando later rejected suggestions that his style had been formed through Strasberg’s coaching).²⁰ Gassner had greatly admired both play and production, applauding Williams’ ability—here, as in his earlier The Glass Menagerie—to combine “the most stringent realism with symbolism” and “transmute the base metal of reality” into a substance significantly more poetic and expansive.²¹ But if such productions represented the US stage at its most innovative and exciting, by the early 1950s they had become all too rare. Gassner’s “Broadway in Review” columns, when Boal was in residence, describe a period of frustratingly “diminished vitality”; new plays repeatedly disappointed through insufficient authorial commitment and irresolute stage action. Gassner picks on Calder Willingham’s End As A Man (1953) to exemplify a broader problem: “the author was neither naïve nor critical. Consequently, he could present only a slice of life, and his play, which leaves us floundering in ‘life’, is therefore not quite art.”²² There were positive exceptions to this state of stagnation: for example, in the same issue Gassner praises Anderson’s Tea and Sympathy, about a boarding-school student “suspected” of homosexuality; the theatre critic for the Chicago Tribune concurred, considering it the first play of real interest “after so many months of nothing new to see that is worth talking about.”²³

In a long essay titled “Forms of Modern Drama...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Editor and contributor biographies
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Theatre of the Oppressed and its time(s)
• PART I Roots
• PART II Ground shifts
• PART III Contemporary practice
• EPILOGUE: Message by Augusto Boal for World Theatre Day 2009
• Appendix: selected terms
• Index